Business success, like brand success, depends on what other people think about you.

If people think you are a dynamic business leader, you are. If people think you’re

a B player, you are (until you change their perceptions). It doesn’t matter what is

“objectively” true. Perception is reality.

Creating positive impressions in the minds of other people is the work of self-branding.

It used to be about “Can you do the job?” Now, many people can do what you do. So it

has to be about something more.

Above all, branding is a strategic process. The goal is to provide that something more that

will help you succeed in a changing, highly competitive business environment (and to be

authentic and even to enjoy yourself in the process). This book is about how you can tap

into soft power—your self-branding power—and harness it for career and life success.

June 6

Who Are YOU?

You are your most important asset. In a sense, you are your only asset. And your ability

 

Branding is about soft power. For companies today, it’s not the hard things—tangibles

like bricks and mortar, equipment and inventories—that contribute the most to a

company’s value. It’s soft things—the brands and company reputation, the ideas and

intellectual capital, the consumer relationships and business alliances—that have the most

Like it or not, branding and soft power affect us every day because they influence how

we feel about something. Few of us make the decision to buy something after carefully

testing and considering the merits of the different brands on the market. No one goes out

and does a blind taste test of colas and then selects the one that objectively tastes best.

Even if it’s a more expensive (and consequently more considered) purchase, like a car or

a laptop, we will compare hard things like product features and performance criteria, but

we will decide based on soft things such as what the brand represents to us.

It’s the same with people. It isn’t the hard, quantifiable things, like educational

credentials, experience, and job titles that contribute the most to success. The real power

lies in harnessing soft power—strategy and tactics, image and visual identity, words and

verbal identity, visibility and reputation, and other branding ideas—all the things that will

help attract people to you.

Good stories have complications that need to be solved

Often there’s a reversal of fortune, twists and turns that take us somewhere we weren’t expecting to go and that make the story exciting and interesting.

For the same reason we like reversals in murder mysteries, we respond to reversals in business stories: they introduce the element of surprise. We like happy endings, so most stories end with the hero surmounting the obstacles, passing the test, and achieving the goal.