Why Personal Branding Overpowers Company Branding

The world has changed a lot in the last few years. The economy has shifted and technology is still running at lightening speed.

Over the last couple of years, one more thing has made a huge shift… Branding.

When I was first taught about branding, it was all about your logo, the fonts you used, the colors in your marketing pieces, etc. It was very much about corporate branding. It’s all about the company and having this professional image.

That’s all fine and well, but over the last few years, we have shifted from corporate branding to “personal branding” or the art of branding your own image over a company.

This is a huge shift. As small business owners, we were supposed to get an 800 number, have a professional voice answer our phones, and make everything we did sound like a big company so we could make believe we were a Fortune 500 company. Even if our big “corporation” was just one guy in shorts and flip-flops running the show.

But now things have changed…. Personal Branding is now mainstream.

So what is personal branding?

It’s about you building your own brand, not focusing on the company.

Think about it. Do we really trust big companies any more? Not really. We want a connection with someone. With the rush of Internet TV, Social Media and the ever growing ease of everyone being their own star, it’s easier than ever to create your own brand that can easily overpower any expensive logo out there.

People want to connect. They want to feel like they know the person they are working with. Remember, people buy from who they KNOW, LIKE, and TRUST. You can’t know a company. You can know a person in the company though. That’s why personal branding has become so big over the last few years.

The goal is to build your own branding. What is it that makes YOU stand out from everyone else? Not your company. It’s going to be your personality. Your style. Your voice. That’s what is going to make you really stand out.

THAT is how you can really make an impact and grow your sales.

What can you do to let people get to know you? How are YOU different? That’s what you want to be thinking about.

Is it your accent? Is it your personality? Your wit? Your fashion sense? Or simply how you help those around you? Those are the things people will remember.

It doesn’t matter if you are the owner of a billion dollar company or a sales rep for a small family owned copy shop, you need to be developing your own branding that people will remember for ages and keep your name on the top of their minds.