To sum up

They say life is a constant fight, a fight for a warm place under the sun. In addition there is another notion which says that the Mother Nature is a hierarchy where the strongest creature is on the top and an unable to survive one always stays at the very bottom. These believes partly justify and can be applied to the modern structure of the mass media world and show business in particular. To survive and succeed in such a tough circumstances new strategies were invented and one of them was personal branding.
Being a leader means to reinforce the strength and fame from time to time, all the time. Apparently personal branding is aimed to build up a certain image (not necessarily truth worthy one) around a person, literally to turn a personality into brand, in order to attract useful people (employers ), to get lucrative deals, to start a new business, to self advertise, to increase the rating and finally to cash in. So briefly speaking personal branding is how a person is perceived in the minds those around him/her. One of the most common notions is that personal branding is preferably used among celebrities because they are more likely to be into branding and the like. However this strategy has started being in demand since the huge corporations (where all people are the same) appeared and such mediums as the internet made the interaction easily available to everyone. Nowadays it’s required to be recognizable in order to survive and reach some goals. Furthermore it needs to be noticed that personal branding (as any other branding in general) isn’t always a positive institution, to be frank it’s mainly negative. As it was already said above personal branding is intended to create an image around an individual, to introduce a certain perception to the public. Thus this process is usually based on lie and brand manager’s fantasy. The alpha of any personal branding is a very complex marketing research of what people aspire to and are more likely to follow and adore. So, due to this fact it’s logical to assume that any celebrity we know (or we think we know) is just an artificial personality that’s formed considering a very technical examinations of our minds. However there is no reason to get frustrated about it. The whole world of marketing relationships that are firmly clustered with our everyday life is designed in that way, so that it has become normal. Otherwise marketing wouldn’t work; it needs to consist of some sort of deception.
In conclusion, contemporary business world is a competition. In order to win a player needs to be creative and sly. There are no rules and morals in the game where as an award is money, fame, power or the like. One of the most effective tricks is personal branding, which usually gets the highest grade from the audience. It’s far from being a fair method on the way to the finish line. However as long as it works it is prerogative.

Web pages I would recommend.

Positioning myself as a branding- junky and ad- sapience I’d like to give a couple of advices here on where to look for the information about branding issue and everything that is connected to it. So that, if you are interested in what’s new going on in the world of brands, methods used in marketing, job offers and many more then brandrepublic.com web page is what you need. Frankly it’s my favorite one because it’s quite entertaining and always up to date (it embraces a lot of areas of branding, providing a comprehensive information). Digging for more news on this topic I’d suggest checking out brandweek.com which might seem pretty similar to the previously described one. However I’d say that some news on this web page can be illuminated from the different prospective (so that a reader might find it useful and form his/her point of view by comparing two different interpretations of any issue). It’s doubtless that advertising is an integral part of branding thus there is a web page adfreak.com I’d like to recommend. It’s also pretty entertaining and includes a lot of fresh ad videos with short comments. Check this out! :)

In addition...

To continue talking about the article “Brand it like Beckham” it’s essential to mention that the main purpose of celebrity personal branding is to reinforce the image and make sure that key attributes of self brand are what people aspire to (Buckley, M. (n.d.). BBC NEWS | UK | Brand it like Beckham. BBC NEWS | News Front Page. Retrieved May 17, 2010, from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4042435.stm). Personally, I reckon it’s a very complex process that involves a participation of a huge number of professionals. Also, the author of this article added several examples from the real life of celebrities and their practical branding campaigns (which makes the content of the text easy to understand and visualize). Furthermore I find it interesting that self brand shouldn’t necessarily recall positive associations in public, but it can also effectively work with a scandalous image as a platform of the brand (as an example Simon Cowell from the article). Overall impression of the article is that celebrities can do whatever they like to make a desired self image stick into people’s minds.

Celebrities have become brands ("Brand it like Beckham")

So, one again I’d like to discuss how celebrities turn their personality into brands as the whole blog is supposed to focus on this very theme. There is an interesting article about it on the web site of main British news broadcasting corporation BBC (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4042435.stm). It’s based on the interview with a personal branding consultant Gabriella Goddard, whose explanations of how things work in this particular sphere run through the entire article. The central idea of the essay is concentrated around methods that are used by celebrities to survive in the glossy world of show business. So, famous people work hard on the way the public sees and perceives them. Nowadays they need to be vivid brands to get a lucrative advertising deal (it’s required to be highly recognizable), to start their own business, to sell new albums or increase the rating of a TV program/film and so on (Buckley, M. (n.d.). BBC NEWS | UK | Brand it like Beckham. BBC NEWS | News Front Page. Retrieved May 17, 2010, from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4042435.stm). It’s also mentioned that there are personal brands that are being built up for a long period of time (i.e. years) and also quick campaigns aimed to impress the audience.

Personal Branding - What Color is Your Brand

Here is a pretty useful video for building up your personal brand! Add up an appropriate color and it will intensively work for you!

Personal brand is getting cheaper!

Undoubtedly the internet is a key tool for spreading media texts and any other sort of information. The virtual space gave a birth to many widely used networks including social networks. So online social networks have more to offer than just an access to pictures of last weekend’s party or updated statuses of friends; a person can also use the virtual space for creating personal brand (Weber, S. (2010, May 10). As personal branding rises, a search for balance | Stanford Daily. Stanford Daily | Breaking news from the Farm since 1892. Retrieved May 17, 2010, from http://www.stanforddaily.com/2010/05/12/as-personal-branding-rises-a-search-for-balance/). So these days one of the most actively discussed motions is the use of the world most popular and beloved social networks Facebook and Myspace as an opportunity for self marketing. It has become a new trend to post self interest, education, skills, job experience and the like in order to spread personal information and that is to attract possible employers. There is a plenty of advantages of doing so: it’s free, pretty easy to create and to distribute. A lot of guides of marketing suggest using social networks for creating a kind of online CV which has a look of a profile. From the first sight it seems to be a great chance for everybody to show up and interact in favour for a future career. However the reverse side of the medal also exists. Easily accessed personal information leads to an easy search (as to balance the situation). Basically it means that anything that was uploaded on the internet once is archived and thus it’s always possible to dig that data up! All the employers know that, but not all prospective employees or current students do (or don’t take it into account). So, enjoying any social network an individual is recommended to be careful with posting materials. Any profile on the internet might work as a tool for personal branding in the future (it shouldn’t be seen as just a space for communicating with friends) that’s why it’s essential to bear in mind the way you want the public to perceive you and stick to that particular image.

Brand yourself through another brand i.e. Kate Moss loves handbags/sells them

In this posting I would like to discuss a recent case of personal branding act. The heroin of the event is a 36 years old model Kate Moss who decided to remind the world about her loft- styled personality. So, Kate Moss designed a special edition of handbags for French label Longchamp. In the interview she said that she is doing it not for the money but because she is passionate about handbags. Also there is a video on the web site of this brand where Kate Moss seems to be adored by everyone! Personally I see it as a very sassy lie in public (that is probably called “building up the image” in PR slang). However her claims seem to be very doubtful. The reason is on the surface: she was paid for launching this campaign (and obviously when it touches the money issue then the purity of the intention is always dubious). In this case Kate Moss’s fame in the world of fashion is pretty valuable in order to attract a good advertising deal with some clothes brand or the like. In addition this particular event is a vivid example of personal branding through a regular branding campaign. Kate Moss reaped the nice benefits from this act: she branded herself and cash in! Smart, but trivial in the same time...( Becker, Polly. "Kate Moss loves handbags/sells them - Celebrity Sell Out Blog – Brand Republic." Celebrity Sell Out Blog – Brand Republic – first for advertising, marketing, media & PR. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 May 2010.)

Brand yourself!

Fame. Power. Wealth. Glory. These words are the basic components of the certain group of people that are commonly called celebrities. Popularity can be of any kind: political, artistic, scientific and so on. However in the very core of any fame (especially if it’s a mass, wide spread one) lies a very complex strategy which is known as PR or branding. Personally I suppose that Branding is a very sly, comprehensive and even genius thing. Apparently it’s a very sophisticated rip off. More than a centery ago branding was dramatically different to the contemporary one and so was its purpose. Within several decades the new approach to what branding mean to economic success and took the ad gurus away from individual products and their attributes toward a psychological/ anthropological examination of it (Klein, Naomi. No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs. New York, NY: Picador, 2009. Print.) So the roots of personal branding lie in branding of goods and later corporations and organisations. It's currently aimed not only to let the public know about somebody's existence but to sell.