Personal Branding: lessons learned from product marketing (PART 1)

Personal Branding is a hot item these days and there are already various blogs and articles written on this topic. But where does is come from, how should we use it and why is it so important?

To answer these questions I want to go back to one of my former roles, being the product marketer at a software company. It is there that I have learned how branding can help you promote your product and reach your goals. Although product branding and personal branding seem to be two completely different things, there are a lot of similarities in my opinion.

My lessons learned:

  1. Define your goal
  2. Stay close to the facts
  3. Be clear about your motives
  4. Don’t wait until tomorrow
  5. Keep your brand intact


Lesson 1: Define your goal

All marketing activities – branding included – are goal-driven activities. For a product supplier branding is a tool out of the marketing toolbox, not a goal. The goal is to sell the product, or more specific: reach new audiences to sell the product to.

With personal branding we – as programmers, testers, consultants, writers, architects, project managers, plumbers etc. – are the product. So the product at personal branding is “me”. Similar to product branding, our goal is not just to establish our brand but to take things one step further and “sell” ourselves (our capabilities and ideas) to customers. In order to do so we have to establish our brand and make it known within our network and beyond. The ultimate goal is to help us in getting or keeping interesting work and make progress in our career.

For me, personally, my goal is to establish myself as a thought leader in Contextual Intelligence.

To be continued

Rather than sending out all lessons learned in one long article, I have divided them over a number of blog posts. In my next blog post I will focus on the second lesson learned: Stay close to the facts.

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