I was just reading an article on “personal brand” and was pondering on questions such as, “What do I want people to think of me when they hear my name? What is my personal brand right now? What would I like my brand to be?”
The word brand as a noun, means “kind, grade, or make, as indicated by a stamp, trademark, a mark made by burning, to indicate kind, grade, make, ownership, any mark of disgrace and stigma. A kind or variety of something distinguished by some distinctive characteristic.” Brand as a verb means “to label or mark with disgrace or infamy, stigmatize.” (www.dictionary.com)
When we hear a name, a brand, we immediately think something positive or negative depending on the brand mentioned. The same occurs with our own names. People either think something positive or negative depending on the interaction they’ve had with us through the years or sometimes just from one interaction, one first impression.
I like to think about brand in the various areas of my life so, for example, in the business arena, I would like people to think of me as a professional, a personal of character and highly ethical, someone who knows the banking field and has the expertise in risk management, and someone that is an “initiator, executor, and finisher.” At the personal level, I would like people to think of me as a person who is genuinely and sincerely interested in others, someone who cares about her relationships and takes the time to nurture her friendships.
From the spiritual perspective, the other day, a good friend of mine asked me a very deep question. We were talking about our callings and what God wanted us to do with our lives while we are here on earth. The question was: “What do you want written on your tombstone when you die?” “How do you want to be remembered?” After thinking for a moment, I said, I want to be remembered as “A woman who loved God, loved people, and helped many achieve significance in their lives.”
You see, in the end what matters most is not so much what we did here as a professional. We will be remembered by who we were as an individual while we were alive, how we treated people, how much we loved on people, and how we were able to help others.
I encourage you to think of your “eternal brand” and focus more on that rather than your professional brand, not that it is not important but it is temporal. Once you have the eternal brand figured out, what you want to be remembered for, then the professional brand will be a reflection of that and it will be easier to base all your “personal marketing materials” off of that.