Are you a job title or a personal brand?

What do you say when people ask you, “What do you do for a living?” or “What is your job?” If you’re like most people, reply with your job title or the industry you’re in or the company you work for. And THAT is what makes most people generic, replaceable, and just another cog in the wheel in the eyes of the people they care about professionally. The key distinction is: Are you a job title or a personal brand?

The difference between a job and a personal brand

Let me explain what I mean. You have two options when you want to talk about what you do. You can decide if you want to be generic or specific. It can be a job title or a personal brand. Everything depends on you. For example, you can say “I’m a nutritionist.” Or you can say, “I treat your child’s illness with my proprietary diets.” Another example: You can say, “I’m a real estate agent.” Or you can say, “No matter how bad your credit is, I can help you buy the property of your choice.” The difference is in the ‘promise’. A job title is simply a word or phrase that broadly describes what you do. However, a targeted response communicates to your audience a unique promise of value: a statement of what your personal brand stands for. When you consider yourself a job title, you are not implying that you are uniquely and authentically relevant to your clients. On the other hand, when you consider yourself a personal brand, you tell people what you do, who you do it for, and more importantly, why they should care (how you’re different).

Components of a brand introduction

So there are three pieces to a strong brand introduction:

1. who is your target audience: for example, I work with service professionals who want to get more clients.
2. what benefit their work brings them: I help them find their unique promise of value and how they can stand out from the crowd.
3. how you are different: I not only use my consulting and training tools, but also draw on my 16 years of experience working with more than 30,000 people

How can you weave these three together into a very short and interesting story about what you do for a living? (See my previous examples)

Seth Godin says, “There are proven strategies that generic products can use to make it more likely that someone will find them by chance. Name your new book with all sorts of keywords in the title, for example, so it has a higher organic ranking for those same keywords…

The alternative is to create a product that gains enough of a reputation that people decide to talk about it, decide to discuss it, decide to search for it. Not something like that, but that.

It’s good to be found. Essential to be searched.

It was always a good idea, but in a post-mobile search and social media era, now it’s the best idea.”

Now the question remains: Are you a job title or a personal brand?