Moving up from Image Management to Personal Branding: Brand Manager

In developing countries like India though Image Management is a popular term, Personal Branding is yet to take off. But as we are moving from academics centric education to holistic education, materialistic rat race to holistic living, we shall slowly move from Image Management to Personal Branding.

But Personal Branding as a concept has to be explained and sold to the target audience, by the pioneers in the field. It would be a sort of upgradation though, a moving up from manipulative Image Management to wholesome Personal Branding.

We can change the image we project without changing our personality. The clientele who want immediate results and are short-sighted would continue with managing their image while the clientele which has the patience and is interested in building genuine long term value based brands would go for Personal Branding.

Image Management focuses on practices and techniques for improving visual appearance, verbal and non-verbal communication skills and business protocol practices. Image management is about managing the image, the perceptions and the projection.

Personal Branding on the other hand is not about creating an image for the outside world but portraying the genuine, authentic self. It involves uncovering your brand rather than creating it. It is about communicating your values, beliefs and personality and demonstrating them in everything you do. It is also about what one stands for. We need to build a holistic, balanced personality and then show rather than tell.

While Personal Branding is straight bowling, Image Management is about giving it a spin. Personal Branding is about understanding your unique characteristics (strengths, values and passions) and using them to separate yourself from competitors and peers. It is about the value you can deliver while Image Management is about projecting what you can deliver (though you may be incompetent to do that in reality).

As Personal Branding Guru William Arruda says, “Personal branding means using who you are to get what you want from life.”

A Brand Manager has to give equal importance to product quality, process quality and convenient availability, which he/she gives to promotion and marketing communications. Similarly when we create our personal brands, we also need to develop an actually balanced impressive personality (not a personality which is good just at impression management). Maria, E. Duron also says, “Spend the bulk of your time “branding yourself” in self discovery and finding out who you really are and how you make a difference.”

In any case, if we are creating artificial impressions, we are at high risk of being exposed, of being laid bare at some point of time. A friend used to joke about boys in a particular city in India, “They look so handsome, but the moment they open their mouth, you get a rude shock.”

So ‘Dear Readers’, do not create an image which creates expectations you cannot meet and a persona which has a great fall, sooner or later. Rather patiently build a personality, a distinct brand which prefers to under-promise and over-deliver.

Source: Dr.Amit Nagpal and Techlunatic.com