How to build a personal brand?

This article will give you a clear answer once and for all on how to build a personal brand.

I will take you to the top of the "personal brand" mountain to see what a personal brand is, and help you re-understand the "essence of personal brand" from multiple perspectives, so that you can avoid detours on the "road to practicing personal branding."

In this article, I will tell you what a true personal brand is, what the purpose of building a personal brand is, and I will give you a complete implementation framework. This framework is the tool I use to provide consulting services to clients. The fees generally range from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands. Anyway, I have written it here. Whether you can learn it depends on your ability and fate.

1. Clarify the definition before developing an action map

In my opinion, building a personal brand has only two effects: either people buy my products or spread my good name. Of course, we would like to pursue "both buying my products and spreading my good name".

I have met many friends who say that they want to build their personal IP, then build their personal brand, and then say that they just want to have some information on the Internet. In fact, these people are so stupid that they can't tell the difference between the two, so they are stuck in a half-understanding situation.

I have a tried-and-tested method: before doing anything, clarify the definition first, and then look for specific methods, paths, and tools. In the process of clarifying the definition, I will search for different definitions of a concept from masters in vertical fields around the world, and then summarize them to come up with what I think is the most reliable definition.

Similarly, if you want to do a good job of personal branding, you must first understand its definition.

After reading all the definitions of "personal brand" at home and abroad, I finally came up with the following definition: personal brand is other people's perception of you. In other words, your reputation determines your personal brand.

In other words, personal branding is the relationship between you and your audience, and the way you manage that relationship to achieve business goals.

Since personal brand is a kind of perception of oneself by others, the process of building a personal brand is to interfere with this perception and shape the personal brand image we want to convey, so as to achieve the business goal of "both buying my products and spreading my good name" by others.

In 2019, I defined personal IP. I said, "Personal IP is a personal brand at a deeper level. The watershed lies in whether it can be continuously output and whether there are no extended and developed products at the back end." Its characteristics are built-in traffic, built-in trust, built-in attention, built-in value, automatic transactions, built-in storytelling, built-in spreadability, etc. I hope that from now on, you will no longer confuse the difference between personal brand and personal IP.

From the definition itself, we can derive four criteria:

1. Personal branding serves commercial purposes.
2. Personal branding is the process of managing your relationship with your audience.
3. The two effects of personal branding are "people buy my products and spread my good name".
4. The process of building a personal brand is all about disrupting your audience's perception of you.

On the other hand, if you go beyond these four standards and talk about personal brand, that would be rogue behavior.

2. What is the use of building a personal brand?

Although it is generally believed that the concept of "personal brand" originated in the United States in the late 1990s, I believe it has existed since ancient times. For example, in the primitive era when people ate raw meat and drank blood, the tribal leader must have a clear image and brand in the minds of other people in the tribe.

For example, when we evaluate ancient literati, we say that Li Bai is elegant and unrestrained, Du Fu is concerned about the country and the people, and Wang Wei is fresh and unworldly. This is our definition of the personal brand of the ancients. Their brand is so distinctive that thousands of years later, their stories and poems are still widely circulated.

The modern "personal brand" actually looks at a person from the perspective of modern commodity science and marketing. If a product wants to find users, it needs to build a brand; and if an individual wants to be accepted and recognized by others in his or her career development or entrepreneurial journey, he or she also needs to build a brand.

For product brands, value and uniqueness are the most important; for personal brands, the most important points are also these two: What value can you provide to others? What is your uniqueness?

For many years, senior executives of large companies have generally enjoyed a company-provided benefit - executive coaching. Executive coaches help leaders understand themselves, clarify their direction, and provide various suggestions and plans to help them achieve their goals and unleash their potential. A very important tool in the executive coach’s “toolbox” is to help these leaders identify and tap into their true personal brand.

Take my client Xiaomi Group for example, Lei Jun has done a very good job in building his personal brand. Moreover, when it comes to building the personal brand of Xiaomi's executive team, Xiaomi is the best among all the leading technology companies. The purpose of Lei Jun doing this is actually to help these presidents and vice presidents tap their potential and help the entire team improve efficiency and innovation.

In order to help companies clarify the effects of investing in their employees’ personal brands, some companies have developed models and software to measure the return on investment of personal branding. It has become a trend for companies to help individuals develop their personal brands.

In the opinion of personal branding expert Leonard Jim, building a personal brand is crucial for entrepreneurs. One reason is that the failure rate of startups is very high, with 95% of startups failing. However, the entrepreneur’s personal brand will always exist. Therefore, he advocates that entrepreneurs should first create a personal brand and then a company. The success of an entrepreneur’s personal brand increases the chances of success for the company.

Of course, in actual business case operations, I have incorporated "personal brand" into the scope of corporate products, and proposed the strategy of "one product, three brands", including: product brand, company brand, and character brand.

In other words, building a personal brand is just like building a product brand. It requires investing time, money, team and other resources. This is from the perspective of business operations. In addition, whether you are a professional or a founder, it is very important to build a personal brand.

You see, the purpose of building a personal brand is to achieve commercial goals. Take Xiaomi for example. To build personal brands for Lei Jun and his senior management team means to establish countless channels that directly reach the minds of the audience, allowing the audience to "buy my mobile phone and spread the good name of Xiaomi."

3. Practical Framework and Methodology of Personal Branding

Principle: Since personal branding is about being a human being and managing the relationship between yourself and your audience, building a personal brand must be done in accordance with the correct standards for being a human being. I think it should be along these lines: authenticity, uniqueness, humility, patience, adaptability, etc.

We always think about how to implement personal brands around the business goal of "buying my products and spreading my good name."

In 2019, I proposed the "Personal Brand Implementation System". This system consists of nine parts. As long as you understand these nine parts, you will truly understand personal branding:

1. Refinement of positioning

The so-called positioning is to solve what I should do and what I should not do. For example, if you are an "independent musician", you cannot do cover songs.

In the positioning sector, we also need to achieve the following at the same time: first in the industry, interest-driven, and a large enough market. Being the first in the industry means making yourself the top brand; being interested mainly means that only what you like can last forever; a large enough market means better commercial realization.

2. Image symbolization

The symbol is the brand, and the personal brand symbol is the personal brand. Personal brand symbols include: hairstyle, expression, accessories, actions, props, clothing, temperament, motto, LOGO, etc. Includes all language symbols and visual symbols.

The symbolization of the image is always planned around the three standards of "being different, revealing one's identity, and bringing trust". Any image symbol that does not meet these three standards at the same time is unqualified.

From the perspective of communication, the purpose of image symbolization is the key to reducing marketing and communication costs, and to achieve automatic identification, automatic description, and automatic sales.

3. Character labeling

In actual practice, I refer to labeling, image symbolization, storytelling and naming as "external practice". These are all handles to facilitate public identification.

The purpose is to strengthen memory, convey professionalism, enhance trust, and reduce the total cost of all communication and marketing. Labels are personalities. One type of label is what you put on yourself, and the other type is what others put on you. We may not remember the other person's name, but we can definitely remember the other person's label.

Every time I attend an event, my friends introduce me as a 90s celebrity with 4 million fans. I actually feel disgusted because in my opinion, internet celebrities are all "slutty and cheap". Why don't they introduce me as the "Chairman of Western Red Strategic Marketing"? The reason is that labels are the first attraction.

4. Popularity of the name

The name is the brand, "Don't be obsessed with me, I'm just a legend", I am Li Xianhong. The name corresponds to the product name, so when naming, it is also better to follow the principles of product naming:

1. Good memory;
2. Easy to spread;
3. Quite straightforward.

For example: Papi Jiang (Jiang Yilei), Luo Pang (Luo Zhenyu), Mimi Meng (Ma Ling), Xue Li (Zhu Chenhui), etc. The name determines the marketing and communication costs, so choosing a good name is also a technical job. I will share the specific methods with you later.

The thought is highly developed. Thoughts are the engine. Personal branding is about building relationships, and these relationships come from your uniqueness and the value you provide.

Therefore, anyone who creates a personal brand must have his or her own ideas, theories, and values. For example: The Western Red Method is my original methodology, which represents my level. This includes theories, principles, methodologies, methods, tools, etc. Theory should have depth, breadth and foresight. Secondly, you must have a set of principles that will never change.

5. Content Specialization

Whether it is thoughts, content, golden sentences, values, etc., in actual business operations, I collectively refer to them as "internal cultivation." Internal skills training includes "listening, speaking, reading, writing, singing, and acting". In the process of creating a personal brand, what can really make you go far is the internal basic skills.

But often, we are not all-rounders, so we will make breakthroughs with a certain specialty. For example, I am better at producing long articles. I often say that inner strength is "real person, true heart, and real ability." In other words, it is what value you can provide to customers.

In terms of content specialization, whether it is short videos, articles, or audio, or whether it is Douyin, Kuaishou, Weibo, Video Account, etc., in my opinion, these are all channels, and the real ultimate media is our "brain". The so-called professional content is rarely innate and can be acquired, so you don’t have to worry.

6. Continue to expand influence

The above solves the question of “who am I”, so the next step is to magnify “who am I”. To expand influence, specific weapons include "books, columns, courses, interviews, websites, videos" etc. Then, you need to advertise through the media, TV stations, terminal media, etc. to let more people know about you.

In terms of expanding influence, I proposed a "personal brand marketing calendar". Take the celebrity IP Lu Han as an example, this is how he maintains his personal brand.

First, proactively create and output content to form secondary and tertiary dissemination, proactively select cooperation platforms, and discuss together what kind of content to produce for celebrities.

Second, create derivative content related to the celebrity IP. Because celebrities have time constraints and cannot guarantee to attend every event in person, the agency has planned "Lu Han Birthday Season", "Lu Han Sports Season" and "Lu Han Wish Season", constantly creating various content, brand projects and fan interactions. The reading volume of the topic "Lu Han's Birthday Season" alone exceeded 2.7 billion.

Third, connect online and offline platforms and brand collaborations to expand influence. For example, Lu Han is the spokesperson for KFC, and his latest music works will be played in KFC stores across the country during a certain period of time.

This is what I call a marketing calendar. For example, every year there is actually a New Year's Eve speech, so Wu Xiaobo, Luo Zhenyu and I are listed as the very few celebrities in China who can give New Year's Eve speeches.

7. Trust system building

Behind every transaction is trust. You can strengthen your professionalism, social status, and enhance trust with your customers through "celebrity endorsements, customer testimonials, professional titles", etc. For example: I am engaged in strategic consulting, and my trust system includes my identity and position, Western Red methodology, trading cases, customer testimonials, certificates of honor, social position, etc.

The purpose of the trust system is to build it around the principle of "built-in trust and automatic transaction". Take myself for example. For those who add me on Zhihu to consult about personal branding, basically 90% of them can make a deal. This is because before they add me on WeChat, they must have read a lot of my articles and even got to know me in detail. That’s why they are willing to come up and pay more than 100,000 yuan to build their personal brand.

8. Promotion and Operation

When it comes to promotion and operation, we must first design a good business model. Strictly speaking, the business model is something that needs to be thought through before a personal brand is created. Promotion and operation include: taking advantage of the situation, hot copywriting, SEO search; accumulating fans, designing transactions, word-of-mouth communication, etc. Take the example of taking advantage of a situation, Luo Yonghao smashing a refrigerator. This kind of story will be spread forever.

In the promotion and operation of a personal brand, it is necessary to continuously create hype, especially for large-scale events like this. What remains is a competition in marketing, operation, communication and other aspects. This is also part of the internal strength of personal branding. Take Lei Jun for example, there is a small team behind him who assists Lei Jun in building his personal brand.

The above nine sections are the framework for the implementation of personal branding, as well as the principles and methods of each section.

Personal branding is not only a process of continuous improvement, but also a process of continuous operation. I suggest everyone not to chase hot topics or try to scam people. It is important to have good intentions. Personal branding is not about doing big things, but about doing a series of small things right, persevering in doing them, starting from the end with the end in mind, and never forgetting your original intention.

In the long river of time, I think only these "chicken soup philosophies" can save those who are lost.

After reading this, you may understand that the so-called building of a personal brand is actually a very complicated project. It is definitely not just about making a video account, posting news, creating an encyclopedia, or making an account. These ideas and behaviors are simply too superficial and naive.

Summary: To build a personal brand is to manage yourself strategically, and then manage your relationship with the audience, so as to achieve commercial monetization.

Author: Li Xianhong

Source: Li Xianhong