Authentic personal branding: most buying decisions are based on trust, confidence, and emotions people have related to a product, service, or person. Branding is more important than marketing and sales. Branding is influencing, by creating a brand identity that associates certain perceptions and feelings with that identity. To be successful in life, you need a personal brand to sell yourself

Today's Manager,  Dec-Jan, 2008  by Hubert Rampersad

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This will create balance in your life. It is about identifying yourself and figuring out what your dream is, who you are, what you stand for, what makes you unique and special, why you are different than anyone, and identifying your genius, incorporating an introduced breathing and silence exercise. You are almost twice as likely to accomplish your brand if you write this down. Formulation is critical to building a strong brand. So take the time to think about your life and to write down your Personal Ambition statement.

* Define and Formulate your Personal Brand.

This phase involves defining and formulating your Personal Brand in an exciting and persuasive manner and making it visible. Take the time to write down your Personal Brand statement, which is related to your Personal Ambition, and create a related compelling brand story to promote the brand called You. First, you should perform a personal SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) and evaluate yourself based on this. The result of this analysis is the definition of your personal life style. This relates to your personal ambition and brand objectives. Your brand objectives entail what you want your Personal Brand to accomplish.

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These should also be related to the four mentioned perspectives: internal, external, knowledge and learning, and finance. You also need to know your audience (domain), their greatest needs, determine your specialisation, concentrate on a single core talent, what your main specific services are, what your key characteristics are, and what your single leading and most powerful attribute is. Your Personal Brand Statement entails the total of your Personal Ambition, domain, specialty, service and dominant attribute. It includes your Unique Selling Proposition (USP). The next step is to define your Personal Brand Story (Elevator pitch), which is the essence of what you want to say about your Personal Brand in order to produce a positive emotional reaction. Finally, you should design your Personal Logo, which is a single graphical symbol that represents your personal brand.

* Formulate your Personal Balanced Scorecard (PBSC). The emphasis in this stage is developing an action plan based on your Personal Ambition and Personal Brand to reach your life and brand objectives and to eliminate any negative elements of your ambition and brand. It's about translating your Personal Ambition and Personal Brand into your PBSC. Vision without action is hallucination and a personal brand without continuously improvement of yourself based on your PBSC is a waste of time, and will not lead to sustainable development of your potential and marketing success.

Your PBSC entails the related personal critical success factors, objectives, performance measures, targets, and improvement actions. It's divided into four perspectives: internal, external, knowledge and learning, and financial perspectives. Your PBSC translates your dream, hopes, aspirations, and values into manageable and measurable personal objectives, milestones, and improvement actions in a balanced way. Your PBSC is needed to improve and manage yourself continuously based on your Personal Ambition and Brand. It's an effective tool that you can use to manage yourself and your brand, by developing improvement actions to achieve your objectives, keeping track of your progress of these actions, recording key brand information, exploring your life and brand, defining new career paths and building network of contacts, and quantify and report your key accomplishments.