Re: Personal Brand
Sorry Jony – I missed your post… good questions though…
Re: 1. the way I see it… it’s really up to the individual to decide whether they’re going to develop their personal brand to be one that appeals to a broad or a narrow audience. It’s just like marketing – Product Uniqueness + Broad Target = Differentiation Strategy… whereas Product Uniqueness + Narrow Target = Focus Strategy.
Basically, what you need to keep in mind is that as a human capital asset, you’re imitable as well as mobile… so you need to find other ways to show your potential employer how you can be part of the equation to help them achieve and sustain an advantage over somebody who doesn’t have you on their payroll.
Re: 2. personal characteristics is certainly more of an intangible quality that needs to be translated somehow into a brand attribute. This can partly be done through testimonials and feedback from others who have worked with you or who you’ve worked for.
Again, to bring in a marketing parallel, this is the dilemma that all brands face with measuring and incorporating aspects of “goodwill”.
Re: 3. This sort of relates to my question Re: brand mapping and whether anyone has seen or thinks companies will ever evaluate personal brands in the same way as other product brands. I personally think it’s very much a possibility. In fact we do this implicitly every time we compare famous people – say celebrity A vs. celebrity B.
You think of two or three dimensions and position their personal brands on those dimensions. The path that human capital management is following, I think soon we’ll start seeing multi-dimensional scaling and cluster analysis type techniques to visually interpret and objectify personal brands as well.