How - and why - to write a personal BrandPrint

You can take your personal brand a giant step forward by creating your own BrandPrint, a short statement that captures the essence of you. Here's how to get started.

Doing so makes possible the sort of meteoric personal branding success that Ree Drummond has enjoyed. She's the creator of The Pioneer Woman blog. I have no idea whether Ree has a BrandPrint, but her work demonstrates a masterful command of her own personal brand. This sort of achievement is impossible until you understand what you are trying to communicate to others.

Back in the mid-1990's, I was part of the Ogilvy & Mather team that helped reinvent the IBM brand. As part of that process, hundreds of people at IBM and our agency worked to come up with IBM's BrandPrint. It was:

"IBM is magic you can trust."

This sentence then drove a new ad campaign, new copy and visuals online, and a whole new perception of IBM.

What's your BrandPrint?

This is really important: I'm not asking you to create a sentence that you will post online, or put in your resume. This is not a tagline. Instead, I'm suggesting you create a sentence or short paragraph that you write on your wall, and keep in mind every time you reach out to others or promote yourself.

Ogilvy's Brand Steward's Handbook is a guide to to help agency teams do their magic for companies, not individuals. But I've adapted some of its wisdom to help you create your own BrandPrint. Yours should:

- express the feelings and perceptions you want others to have about you

- convey the absolute rock-bottom truth of who you are professionally

- be very short

- be truthful

- be unique

This is not an easy undertaking. (If memory serves me, IBM's took about six months to create, even though it is only a sentence long.)

At times, you may feel foolish, or like you are spinning your wheels. But stick with it. The right BrandPrint will make everything else you do so much easier, and more effective.

There is no single correct answer. Ree might write a BrandPrint that's eight words long; a banker might write three paragraphs. Here are a few tips...

Be creative: Your personality should shine through. Be bold, funny, inventive or somber - whichever terms fit who you really are.

Don't be generic: "I'm a trustworthy financial advisor" describes about 500,000 professionals worldwide. What's the difference between you and every one of them?

Say who you want to be: You may currently crunch numbers all day, but that doesn't necessarily represent who you want to be. When IBM came up with their new BrandPrint, they had recently been perceived as arrogant and a bit stale. A BrandPrint is a powerful tool to change how people perceive you.

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Bruce Kasanoff is author of Simplify the Future, your guide to a successful career and a rewarding life.

Photo credit: Ace Cuervo