To Brand. Rebrand. Or Reposition? [+ How You Determine What’s Best For You]

The term branding or more specifically personal branding is used in many ways– rightly and wrongly. 

Depending on where you’re in your own career journey – you may already have built a Personal Brand and reputation around your area of expertise but want to amplify it and make a bigger impact

Maybe you’re at a stage where you want to change direction and don’t want to be known for your past anymore. 

Maybe you want to fast track your career success but not sure where to start?

Should you brand, rebrand, reposition, all of the above or none? 

Let’s find out because this is exactly what this episode is all about!

First things first- you already have a Personal Brand, whether you like it or not, whether you manage it proactively or not. 

Your Personal Brand is what others associate with you – your characteristics, your area of expertise, traits, your story – you name it. And depending on how you manage it (or not) – it can either be your biggest asset or your biggest liability. 

Good news- you’re in control of what other people say about you.

So in order to make your Brand work for you, let’s get the technicalities out of the way and see what you need to focus on to achieve to your next goal:

Branding is your point of difference.

It’s an intersection of your personality, your strengths, interests, goals, expertise, experience, education and of course, the results you can bring to others. 

Branding however, isn’t marketing. These 2 terms often get confused and whilst they go hand in hand, marketing is the amplification of your Brand, the promoting of your message and what you stand for.

Branding is the step that comes before Marketing. Well, ideally anyway but unfortunately not always. 

I always say it’s the ‘unsexy’ part because it’s about going deep without seeing an immediate result. 

It’s about getting clear on the attributes you want people associate with you, the values you stand for and how you align them in your day-to-day activities. It all impacts the marketing of it – the colours you choose, the fonts, the images – all of the visible elements of your Brand.

But this is also where many people start: they have a look at other people’s profiles or check out Pinterest and save colour palettes and just copy and paste that. And then wonder why they either don’t get any traction or even worse- the attention by the wrong people and for the wrong opportunities,

It’s because there is a misalign between what a person or company wants to stand for and what others perceive or expect from them based on what they put out there.

I can’t stress it often enough that Branding is an inside job and needs to come before you invest in any logo design, LinkedIn revamps, websites, you name it: it’s about clarifying ‘why you’ and for whom so that you can then do the marketing for yourself and getting in front of the right people with the right material.

This leads us in what’s often the missing piece for highly driven professionals who want to progress and don’t seem to get anywhere.

It’s because they don’t amplify their Brand or at least not where they want to make an impact:

I’ve worked with many professionals, mainly with senior professionals and the reason why they don’t land speaking engagements, board roles or promotions is not the lack of experience, degrees or expertise.

It’s a lack of visibility. 

Maybe you’ve heard of the PIE concept – Harvey Coleman explored the impact of PIE on your career success.

Basically, he found out that there are 3 key elements that contribute to people progressing in their careers. These elements are:

1.     Performance – how good you are at your job and how good the results are of what you do.
2.     Image – is about you and how you are perceived. 

3.     Exposure – is all about how well people know about what you do i.e. not just your boss but your boss’s boss and the leaders and partners of other departments.

Now what’s really interesting in this research is that only 10% of career success comes down to performance. 30% is image and a whopping 60% comes down to exposure. 

As the saying goes- if a tree falls in the forest, does it even make a noise when no one is there?

Same goes for your career – when you’re amazing at what you do but no one (and we’re talking about the decision makers here, not everyone), then does it even count?

Lack of visibility and exposure is what most need to progress to the next stage. But in order to get seen and remembered by the right people, it comes down to clarifying what you want to stand for and how best to communicate it via your marketing material.

So remember: Visibility trumps ability

A powerful way to brand yourself quickly and gain the exposure and visibility you need is called: Branding by association.

It means that you surround yourself with those who already have a strong reputation in the field you want to get into or the area of expertise you want to be known for. It’s kind of piggy bagging but in a good way and you can do this by simply tagging them in posts, being mentioned in the same sentence with them or even getting a shout out by them already boosts your credibility. 

That’s the power of having a strong brand: it’s trust and the reassurance that we are not disappointed with our choice. Think of your favourite Brand: you choose them and do it over and over because you know what you get and it hasn’t disappointed you.

So if your goal is to stay in your field, profession or industry and you realise that despite of you having more expertise and experience than most others but no one knows of that, then defining and amplifying your Brand is for you.

It means that you want to hone in on what you do already but amplify it. 

If you, however, want to stay in your field but want to change the way how people perceive you or your message, then rebranding is your answer.

It often involves only a few tweaks, like changing your profile picture, updating your headline, swapping colours. 

For example, I’ve gone through a rebrand over the last 3 months myself and quite a few more before this one. It’s a necessity if you want to stay relevant because the world changes, priorities changes, topics are changing. And so must you. 

In a rebranding process, you adjust your messaging to make it more relevant to what’s happening or sometimes clearer so there is no confusion. Maybe you simply want to change your audience and decision makers whilst keeping the same message. 

If you’re following me especially on Instagram since it is such a visual platform – oh, and by the way if you don’t …. What are you waiting for? Let’s connect! You’d have seen a different look & feel of my posts. 

A lot bolder colours, stronger fonts and a more minimalistic style. 

It’s been quite a long process because I felt for a while that the old design wans’t quite the right fit for me anymore.

But it takes a while to refine it and land on the ‘right’ design. 

And just a side note here – if you’re not embarrassed by your first logo, podcast, blog post, video – you name it, you’ve launched too late. 

It’s a learning process and the only way you can move forward, and pivot is by being in motion. So don’t wait to have it ‘right’ and ‘perfect’ because it will never be and even if, you’re evolving so your Brand and Marketing of it will and should evolve with you. 

You’re leaving too many opportunities on the table if you’re procrastinating and sitting on it too long.

See, I still stick to my core of personal branding however, I have decided to drop skill development and with that, my previous podcasts and also the membership which was called Future of Work Campus. 

July was also my birthday and it’s usually big events like that that make us reflect more than usual.

I felt I have outgrown this space for quite some time, I have also lost a bit interest and motivation for it. 

Plus- it was too confusing managing both Brands. And to mark this change and make it more visible, I have rebranded from a more visual and copywriting point of view.

My message, however, hasn’t changed because I still believe wholeheartedly that building your Personal Brand is the Future of Work and the key to career success.

What I did change is the tagline. Some behind the scenes here and this is only what you can learn when you actually do it rather than just thinking about it: I realised that the word ‘future-proofing’ wasn’t sexy enough, aka people didn’t feel the sense of urgency to act as future can still be a fair while away (although it is already here).

People want to have an immediate benefit and outcome so focusing more on what’s in it for them right now (which still impacts their future) has been a massive game changer. I changed the tagline to ‘turning your expert ability into global visibility’ so you can increase your points of impact. And let me tell you – it has made a huge difference in the uptake already. Did I change anything to my program or delivery? 

No, I didn’t. I simply got a lot clearer and straight to the point and also made it more visible in my creative assets. 

This is what rebranding is all about.

Let’s talk about the final strategy: Repositioning 

Let’s say you want to stay in your lane, aka continuing in your profession or industry but want people to either have a different association with you and/or you want to change your audience and decision makers – this is when you want to reposition yourself. 

One of my clients is a lawyer with a background as trained accountant and experience working in HR. Now whilst she loves what she does, she doesn’t love what her industry and most practicing law firms stand for. 

Also her approach is different since she has such a diverse background and experience. She is very commercially minded and also understands the impact of building a strong culture for the future success of a company. 

When we went through my process, we have identified that she is all about setting up and optimising systems, processes and procedures: in other words: operations. She doesn’t want to be known for a stale and very upright lawyer although this is still a main focus of her offer. 

Instead, she wants to be known as someone who assists in helping fast-growing and fast paced businesses to scale and do it the right way. So the positioning we landed on is focused on operations, as consultant, educator as well as chief operating officer on demand.

Would that be the first thing that come to mind when you think of a qualified lawyer? Probably not. So this is where repositioning and also repacking of what you have to offer comes in.

See the difference?

There is no right or wrong- it depends on which stage you’re in right now and where you want to take your career. Chances are – you are going through all of those at some point.

And here is the good news:

It all starts the same way:

It’s getting clear about yourself, your goals and your strengths. That is the foundation to develop a strategy, and this can be broken into actionable steps. This is what next week’s episode is all about:

If you want to get started with building your Personal Brand, download your free step by step guide NOW.