Increasingly, people wanting to successfully manage their own career are being urged to regard themselves as a brand.  You don’t have to look very far to notice the growing number of ads for seminars and workshops designed to help you identify what your brand is.  While it’s easy to understand what a corporate product or service is, it’s not always easy viewing yourself as the equivalent of a product on a store shelf.

It’s not uncommon to hear accomplished sales and marketing professionals in career transition struggle with applying brand thinking to themselves.  Many have trouble thinking of themselves as a product even though they know how to use well-crafted sound bites, overcome buyer concerns, and ‘ask for the order’, all to close the deal for their employer.

If you want to clear these hurdles and develop your brand, a simple but powerful question to ask yourself is ― what do I want to be known for?  Whether you are in the early stages of your professional life or an experienced professional with years of service under your belt, knowing the answer to this question can help.

Almost all of the time, the answer extends beyond your core skills and expertise to include your intangible assets such as your style, character and values.  It could be the way you demonstrate flexibility, resilience and adaptability or perhaps the number and range of professional relationships you have. It may be a natural gift you bring in communications, brokering or problem-solving or the way you own the challenges you take on.

When you focus on what you want to be known for, you are diligently gauging each opportunity, each group of potential new colleagues, and each target company’s challenges in relation to the ongoing development of your brand and its service value in a dynamic marketplace.

What sets of needs are you uniquely positioned and motivated to address?  How are fluid market forces changing those needs? How do these changes impact your ongoing brand offering?  In today’s highly charged, fast-paced workplace where an authentic service orientation is prized, it is always a great advantage for you and the potential buyers of your brand to have a clear picture of what that brand stands for including its distinctive value for each buyer.

If the idea of a proactive and planned approach to your professional life resonates with you, explore the merits of enlisting a committed partner in this important work by touching base with Personal Due Diligence (PDD) and its multi-disciplinary team of professionals.