By reading this book, using the 360°Reach personal brand assessment, and working on the exercises in the Career Distinction Workbook, you’ve taken those all-important first steps in the personal branding process. Now you know what you want from your career and what you must do to achieve your professional goals. But personal branding is not a one-time event. To stay on the path to success, you need to continually assess how your brand is performing and make adjustments as needed to continue advancing toward your professional goals.
As we noted in the beginning chapters, career management is something you should be doing every day. When you adopt this mindset, you gain control over your professional destiny, you deliver greater value to your employer or clients, and you move steadily toward your objectives. All strong brands remain self-aware and relevant so they can maintain career momentum.
As you begin to take action toward the fulfillment of your goals and dreams, you must realize that not every action will be perfect. Not every action will produce the desired result. Not every action will work. Making mistakes, getting it almost right, and experimenting to see what happens are all part of the process of eventually getting it right.
—Jack Canfield, author of Chicken Soup for the Soul
You’ve unearthed your unique promise of value. You’ve identified communications tools to reach your target audience, and you’ve devised a plan for ensuring that your communications are clear, consistent, and constant (the three Cs of branding). You’ve also figured out how to shape your brand environment, including building and strengthening your professional network. But how will you know whether these efforts are paying off? You must regularly assess your brand’s performance.
Only you can decide how to measure your brand’s effectiveness. The key is establishing metrics up front, for example, is it:
No matter which metrics you select, make sure you check your brand’s performance against those metrics at least once a year. Every major corporation performs brand measurement as a matter of course. Some companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on research to understand consumer perceptions of their brands, gauge brand awareness, and evaluate the strength of emotional and rational brand attributes. You must conduct similar research on your own brand’s performance against the metrics you’ve chosen (of course, with a more modest budget!). Refer to the exercise in the Career Distinction Workbook for support in determining metrics.
Identify trusted colleagues, superiors, clients, and peers inside and outside your organization who can provide honest feedback on your brand. Ask them, “How am I doing?” at different stages of your relationship with them; you’ll gain valuable insights. Get as much input as you can, to make your brand’s output as strong as possible. Document this input in the associated exercise in the Career Distinction Workbook so you can refer to it as needed. When you receive this input, look at it through the lens of what will help you achieve your goals. Which pieces of feedback are most valuable to your success? How can you integrate this feedback into your career management strategy?
Here are some ways to gather feedback:
As things change around you, you’ll want to constantly assess your brand and the value that it’s bringing you. By paying daily attention to what is and what isn’t rewarding about your career, you can adapt your efforts to make any needed midcourse corrections.
When you’re finished changing, you’re finished.
—Benjamin Franklin, inventor and statesman
To remain relevant to their target audiences, all strong brands evolve with the times. In the business world, these changes could come in the form of product-line extensions. For example, Nick Graham of Joe Boxer went from novelty neckties to underwear. You might also change the way you communicate your brand, such as publishing a project proposal on a website instead of on paper in order to reach a larger audience. In addition, you could augment your brand attributes as you progress in your career (much as Volvo has been adding the attribute “style” to “safety” in the design of its cars).
Kirsten’s brand has evolved significantly since she began her branding journey in 2004. As she launched Brandego and Reach Branding Club, she realized that she had found her niche as a career-echnology expert. Even though she had built this reputation within one professional association, she hadn’t fully committed to it, nor was she expressing it consistently. When her original business didn’t fit with her newly defined brand, she sold it. (Another reason for selling it was to keep her sanity: Having three companies at the same time was not enjoyable!) When Kirsten found that she could reach a wider audience through speaking, writing, and developing products and services, she began to spend more time working in these creative areas—which are much more in line with her talents and long-term goals.
As you track your progress toward your goals, ask yourself whether your brand still aligns with your goals and whether you’ve developed the right communications mix to make your brand visible and credible. You may also want to revisit the Step 1: Extract chapters in this book to see whether any of your responses have changed over time. If they have, then reexamine and update your brand statement and profile.
In the new world of work, the only constant is change. Thus, you cannot stand still as everything around you evolves. But fine-tuning your brand doesn’t mean losing your authenticity. In fact, it suggests quite the opposite. As your brand evolves, it becomes an even more accurate representation of who you are. No matter how your brand might change, your larger vision and long-term goals remain constant. Evolving your brand means thinking of new ways to deliver on your personal brand promise. And it means making changes to continue maintaining your career distinction. We leave you with the following 12 tips for ensuring that you stand out—always: