The Me Brand

IN ORDER TO BE ACKNOWLEDGED ON THE JOB, COMMUNICATION SKILLS ARE NOT ENOUGH. PERSONAL BRANDING AND ORGANIZATIONAL SKILLS ARE ALSO REQUIRED

by Maria Carmela Ostillio, SDA Bocconi School of Management
Translated by Alex Foti

Even those who have never heard of personal branding will have spoken, in a professional or social context, of "putting my face on it", i.e. about credibility and personal reputation. Even if in the past there was reluctance and psychological barriers to think of oneself as a brand, the simple expressions in the previous sentence subtend the basics of individual brand management: the ability of a brand to make identification possible, its source of credibility and  the consequent attribution of responsibility (one’s face); the ability of the brand to cut down informational and psychological risk in decision-making by acting as a short-cut device that warrants trust and is itself a source of reputation; the self, i.e. the individual as a resource to be managed, to whom the brand must bring benefits in terms of providing a credible image.

If personal branding has, therefore, always existed, we owe its conceptualization to Tom Peters and his 1997 article titled “A Brand Called You”, where he argued that anyone, no matter their professional field, is primarily an entrepreneur of himself or herself, CEO and marketing director of the “me corporation”.

The importance of personal branding has been heightened by the digital transformation of business currently underway. The development of social media has brought new challenges and opportunities for personal branding; the transition from mass communication to self-communication as an interactive way to reach a wider or more targeted audience with platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, has allowed users to release information about themselves of a personal or professional nature. Today the individual is required to develop individual and organizational skills necessary to manage himself or herself, so take and implement decisions that increase the value of personal branding.

However personal branding is not just about communication, and is definitely not about showing off on social media. Personal branding does not even mean working on the self in terms of organizational behavior, so to act better in organizations as well as better interact with colleagues and supervisors. In fact, the journey for personal branding is long and tortuous. It combines very different and complex disciplines, from marketing, management and communication to sociology, psychology, leadership, technology, digital and social media management – either to analyze existing trends or to keep abreast of developments on the issue in management studies. But despite these difficulties, reflecting on the subject from a methodological point of view we can consider the tendency towards which business and managerial approaches converge is a single one: the person as a brand. Therefore, the necessary starting point for personal branding is to understand people’s personalities, the conditions that determine emotions, perceptions, motivations that induce individuals to define the objectives towards which they strive, as they create, participate, produce and innovate.