When someone says “Tell me about yourself” what do you say? Use your personal profile can be a lead tool for telling your personal brand story, whether at your next job interview, on your LinkedIn profile, on your personal blog, or at any industry events. You can work on a long and shorter version of your personal profile.
To illustrate, click on diagram to zoom in to see personal profile.
Your personal profile
Everyone should have a personal profile to tell their brand story
- First, start the personal profile with your desired reputation. Think of a personal vision statement for how you wish to be viewed five or ten years from now.
- Next, talk about the difference you make, whether it is in your job or business you are leading.
- Then, solidify your personal profile by using your background qualifications, including employment history, notable awards, or education degrees.
- Layer in other unique experiences, publications, event participation, or charity involvement.
- Finally, as we would with a brand, provide your stated promise declaration, which is your purpose behind your vision. Using your promise is a compelling way to end your personal profile.
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Personal brand
Four Questions to define your 7-second personal brand
To illustrate, click on diagram to zoom in to see how to build your personal brand.
- First, how do you define yourself, by where you see yourself having the biggest impact?
- Next, what is the primary benefit you provide your target, whether they are potential prospects?
- Then, what is the secondary benefit you provide your target, whether they are potential prospects?
- Finally, what is the expected result you deliver, that matches up to your target’s potential goals?
To illustrate, click on diagram to zoom in to see how to build your personal brand.
Brainstorm worksheet
Our personal profile model is a great way to summarize yourself, based on what you have done over the last few years. Brainstorm your thinking for each of the four questions to get everything out.
Focus on being forward-looking with an aspiration for what you want to be, not stuck in what you have been.
Focus on the most important elements. Then begin to piece it all together and see what your own 7-second pitch might start to look like. Keep tightening that pitch until it flows.
To illustrate, click on diagram to zoom in to see how to deliver your personal brand.
Once you have brainstormed and narrowed down the key elements of your 7-second pitch, take each of those four statement areas and try to come up with examples and stories from your past that can prove and demonstrate each element of the statement. These examples help define your 30-minute pitch, and enable you to tell your story in a more focused and expressive manner.
Organizing the stories behind your personal brand to create your 30-minute brand story
Now go back and build out 2-3 support points or stories for each of the segments of your personal brand. This allows you to turn your 7-second pitch into a 30-minute conversation.
To illustrate, click on diagram to zoom in to see how to build your personal brand.
M A R K E T I N G B O O K
beloved brands
the playbook for how to create a brand your consumers will love
Covering every aspect of brand management, it is no wonder that our readers reach for Beloved Brands multiple times each week to guide them through the challenges of day-to-day brand management.
Get ready for a mind-bending journey as we take you on a deep dive into your brand strategy. We’ll challenge you with thought-provoking questions designed to shake up your thinking and help you see your brand in a whole new light. And our unique process for defining your brand positioning will leave you with fresh ideas and new possibilities for how to differentiate your brand.
But we won’t just leave you with ideas – we’ll show you how to turn them into action. Learn how to write a brand plan that everyone can follow, ensuring that all stakeholders are aligned and contributing to your brand’s success. We’ll walk you through the creative execution process, from writing an inspiring brief to making smart and breakthrough decisions.
And when it comes tao analyzing your brand’s performance, we’ve got you covered. Our innovative methods will help you dive deep and uncover insights you never knew existed, giving you the knowledge you need to make the best decisions for your brand’s future.
But don’t just take our word for it – our Amazon reviews speak for themselves.
With over 85% of our customers giving us a glowing five-star rating and an overall rating of 4.8 out of 5.0, we know we’re doing something right. And with numerous weeks as the #1 bestseller in brand management, you can trust that we have the experience and expertise to help you achieve success.
Ready to join the ranks of the Beloved Brands community? Order our book on Amazon, Rakuten Kobo, or Apple and start your journey towards brand success today.
Take a read through our sample chapter on strategic thinking
85% give Beloved Brands a perfect 5-Star rating!
The cheat code for future brand leaders!
It is without a doubt the most practical book for those who want to follow brand management that I have ever read in my life! Beloved Brands is written by a real, experienced marketeer for marketers. This book contains methodologies, tools, templates and thought processes that Graham actually used and uses in his career.
I have Brand Love for Beloved Brands!
As a 24-year marketing veteran at a Fortune 100 company, I thought I knew everything I needed to know about building brands until I started following Graham on social media. Graham has an amazing gift of bringing to life the critical elements of brand building and management in a delightful, easy-to-understand way and includes numerous examples and case histories that turn theory into practical reality for the reader. His tools and templates throughout the book make it VERY easy for the reader to immediately apply the critical principles of brand management to build a brand that consumers will love for the long term.
Such a phenomenal book
I know other new brand managers that have literally used this to review their business’ and create their annual brand strategy plans. Undeniably, Beloved Brands is phenomenal in concept and in execution. I highly recommend this book.
Projecting your personal brand
Use your personal brand idea to establish consistency across every media choice you use
In today’s cluttered media world, use your personal brand idea to help organize all types of marketing communication efforts, including your brand story, sales material, networking, creating your own home page or blog, managing the search of yourself, portraying your personal brand through social media, and looking to establish yourself through any influence marketing.
When telling your brand story, you now have many media options available, including white papers, blog posts, LinkedIn updates, networking meetings, or delivering presentations at industry events. Tell the same brand story, with consistent layers of brand messaging. There is nothing wrong with repetition, primarily if you use various media options to make it more engaging.
To illustrate, click on diagram to zoom in to see how to stretch personal brand idea.
Using your personal brand at your next job interview
Using these examples, you can any of the “so tell me a time when…” type questions. If these are your best ten accomplishments, you should refer to these to help demonstrate your brand idea. This is also a great page you can look at when sitting in the reception area just before your interview.
- “So tell me about yourself”: Deliver your 7-second pitch.
- “Tell me about a time when you…”: Deliver any of the ten examples from your 30-minute pitch.
- “Anything to add?”: Repeat your 7-second pitch as the closing line.
To illustrate, click on diagram to zoom in to see how to project your personal brand.
Marketing Careers
On a classic marketing team, there are four key levels:
- Assistant Brand Manager.
- Brand Manager.
- Marketing Director or Group Marketing Director.
- VP Marketing or CMO.
To illustrate, click to zoom in on the brand management career pathway.
At the Brand Manager level, it becomes about ownership and strategic thinking within your brand plan. Most Brand Managers are honestly a disaster with their first direct report, and get better around the fifth report.
When you get to the Marketing Director role, it becomes more about managing and leading than it does about thinking and doing. To be great, you need to motivate the greatness from your team and let your best players to do their absolute best.
And finally, at the CMO level, you must create your own vision, focus on your people to make them better and shine, drive the business results, and run the processes.
Our Beloved Brands Marketing Training program will make your team smarter.
If you are running a marketing team, you will always benefit from having a smarter team. When you invest in our marketing training program, you will help your team gain the marketing skills they need to succeed. As a result, you will see them make smarter decisions and produce exceptional work that drives business growth.
We’ll work with your team to help them learn more about the five core marketing skills: Strategic Thinking, Brand Positioning, Marketing Planning, Marketing Execution, and Brand Analytics. Most importantly, your marketers will learn new tools, concepts, and ideas to trigger new thinking. To help their skills, we get participants to take each tool on a test run. Then, we give feedback for them to keep improving.
To illustrate, click to zoom in on the brand management career pathway.
Strategic Thinking:
Our marketing training teaches brand leaders how to ask tough strategic questions to slow everyone down and engage in debate of options to move forward. To start, you will be given various tools to approach strategy in a thoughtful, analytical way. Importantly, marketers need learn how to change brain speeds to move from a strategic thinker style to uncover what is holding back a brand, and onto an instinctual thinker style on marketing execution.
We introduce our Strategic ThinkBox that allows marketers to interrogate their brand. Importantly, our ThinkBox pushes you to take a holistic look at the brand’s core strength, competitive landscape, tightness of the consumer bond, and business situation.
Brand Positioning:
Our brand positioning process teaches how to decide on the target market, consumer benefits, and reasons to believe. To start, you will learn to define the ideal consumer and frame the definition with their biggest needs, consumer insights and their enemy. Then, we provide our benefit cheatsheets to help learn how to discover the functional benefits and emotional benefits that a brand can deliver. Importantly, marketers need to make a decision on trying to stake out a unique space that is motivating to consumers, and ownable for the brand.
You will learn to use our brand idea tool and see how it helps to communicate the brand idea to everyone across the organization. Finally, marketers will learn how to take the brand positioning work and translate it into a brand concept, brand story, and a brand credo.
Marketing Plans:
We see the marketing plan is a decision-making tool on how a brand will spend their limited resources. Moreover, the marketing plan communicates the expectations to everyone who works on the brand. Importantly, we teach marketers how to put together the vision, purpose, goals, key issues, strategies and marketing execution plans.
You will learn how to write key issue questions and strategic statements that forms the foundation of the marketing plan. In addition, our marketing training provides various marketing planning templates including our one-page brand plan and ideal Marketing Plan presentation deck.
Marketing Execution:
Our marketing execution training starts with the concept of our Marketing PlayBox that matches up to the Strategic ThinkBox. To keep marketers on strategy throughout the execution stages, our Marketing PlayBox helps find in-the-box ideas that meet four dimensions: they are focused on our target, fit with the brand, deliver the message, and execute the strategy.
To start, we show how the creative brief sets up the PlayBox, serving as the bridge between the plan and execution. We go through the creative brief line-by line and give you examples of the best and worst. Importantly, you will learn to use our Creative Checklist to help make smarter decisions on creative communications. We workshop how to give feedback to your agency based on gaps you see with the checklist.
You will learn to make media decisions that match up to your consumer’s purchase journey. In addition, we provide a similar Innovation Checklist to compare innovation ideas.
Brand Analytics:
Our comprehensive brand analytics training teach brand leaders how to lead a deep-dive business review. We outline the best analytical thinking so you can become a well-rounded marketer.
Learn to look at the marketplace, consumer analytics, channels of distribution, competitors or other brands in their industry. And, learn assess the brand itself. Importantly, you will learn how marketing funnels can help assess the brand’s performance. We provide 64 analytical questions that marketers can ask of their brand. Finally, we show how to understand the financial performance indicators of the brand.
Our training looks at three specific streams; Consumer Marketing Training, B2B Marketing Training, and Healthcare Marketing Training. With each program, all the of the examples are tailored to the type of marketer. Undoubtedly, we believe marketers will be at their best when the can see the concepts or tools working on their type of brand.
Take a look at our Marketing Skills assessment tool to see how you or your marketing team measure up.
For more information on our Beloved Brands Marketing Training programs, click below or email Graham Robertson at [email protected]
M A R K E T I N G B O O K
b2b brands
the b2b playbook for how to create a brand your customers will love
As a B2B marketer, you know that the key to driving growth is a strong brand. But how do you develop and execute a winning B2B brand strategy? Look no further than the B2B Brands playbook.
Prepare to think differently about your B2B brand strategy with B2B Brands. We want to challenge you with thought-provoking questions and take you through our process for defining your brand positioning. Our goal is to expand your mind to new possibilities for your brand by using real-life examples of successful B2B brand positioning strategies.
We’ll start by showing you how to create a brand plan that’s easy for everyone to follow, ensuring that all stakeholders understand how they can contribute to your brand’s success. Moreover, we guide you through the creative execution process, including how to write an inspiring brief and make decisions to achieve smart and innovative communications.
Finally, we’ll teach you new methods to analyze your brand’s performance through a deep-dive business review.
Our B2B Brands playbook offers a wealth of knowledge and insights, including B2B case studies and examples to help you learn new techniques. It’s no wonder that 85% of our Amazon reviewers have given us a 5-star rating. So, join us on this journey to unleash the potential of your B2B brand.
Take a read through our sample chapter on marketing decisions
Other articles on marketing careers
Click on any of these links below:
- Navigating your marketing career.
- Success at the Assistant Brand Manager level.
- Success at the Brand Manager level.
- How to be successful at the Marketing Director level.
- Success at the VP Marketing or CMO level.
- Why brand managers fail.
- How to build your personal brand.
- Social Media: How to make the most of your online presence.
- Five career questions marketers should ask themselves once a year.
- Why the idiot curve shows up at every level of your marketing career.
- A tool for CMOs to use to evaluate your team.
- Why entry-level marketers fail.
- How to deal with stress in a marketing job.
Learn from these brand case studies
Explore how these real-world examples demonstrate the effectiveness of our brand management tools. Click on the logo to read the case study.
To read our case studies, click on the brand logo you want to read more about.
