Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Be Your Own Brand - Introduction
Be Your Own Brand - Introduction
“Be Your Own Brand explores the notion of a personal brand not as
some kind of scripted performance but as the most genuine and nat-
ural affirmation of individual strengths and distinctiveness.”
—Matthew Damon, President, Nilan Johnson Lewis
“In the financial services business, the personal brand of each advisor
has a big impact on client loyalty. When the personal brand of an
advisor is aligned with the company’s brand, both become stronger
together. The innovative personal brand concepts in Be Your Own
Brand will help advisors build a stronger personal brand.”
—Wick Manley, Senior Vice President, AgStar Financial Services
“The one sales effectiveness book every sales and marketing executive
should have on the bookshelf, Be Your Own Brand speaks to today’s
most urgent business issue: your people are your brand. I found every
page to be full of great ideas and powerful insights.”
—E. Patrick Gallagher, Director, Learning and Development, FindLaw, a
Thomson Reuters Company
“As this book says, the brand on the outside is only as good as the
brand on the inside. Based on the personal brand concepts in this
book, the brand training program we created with Karl helps our as-
sociates align their personal brands with our enterprise brand.”
—Mark Berryman Hier, Second Vice President, Communications and
Research, Securian Financial Group, Inc.
“After reading Be Your Own Brand, I only wish that I would have read
this book when I started my career as a brand professional sixteen
years ago. It’s a must-read book for people who wish to achieve their
highest level in life. I am currently lecturing in an international univer-
sity, and this book is mandatory for all my students.”
—Dino Martin, Brand Consultant and Associate Faculty Member, Binus
University, Jakarta, Indonesia
“Everyone has a brand. This book will teach you how to translate your
purpose, vision, and values into a strong personal and professional
brand. The book leads you on a journey that will help you understand
the power of your personal brand and nurture its evolution through-
out your career.”
—Agnes Ring, Vice President, Bonestroo
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Being More of Who You Are 1
have helped expand its use. The second trend is social media. The
introduction and omnipresence of social media has created a tool
that enables individuals to build a stronger personal brand in a way
hardly imagined when we published the first edition.
After the book was published in 2002, we set out on our sepa-
rate paths to apply the concepts of personal brand in our different
businesses.
Karl, as the principal of Brand Tool Box, Ltd., applied the con-
cepts of personal brand in his capacity as a corporate brand strate-
gist. The pragmatic framework of personal brand allowed Karl to
create a useful and powerful foundation for internal brand build-
ing. At the core of this corporate brand-building innovation is
a framework to align the personal brands of employees with the
brand of their corporate employer.
David, as a renowned business speaker and executive coach,
employed the framework of personal brand in his business, which
is built on inspiring others to thrive through living a purposeful
autism since she was a child, who has invented some of the most
important improvements in the humane treatment of cattle and
was the recent subject of a highly acclaimed HBO film. And you
will meet Norman Borlaug, who single-handedly started the Green
Revolution and did more than anyone else in the twentieth century
to teach the world to feed itself, reducing world hunger on a large
scale. And then there’s Willem Kolff, a humble Dutch physician
who was the pioneer inventor of two important medical devices that
have saved millions of lives.
After eight years of helping others understand and embrace the
concepts of personal brand, we think we have learned a few things
and firmly believe that by sharing them with others the world will
benefit from having more strong personal brands. We are hopeful
that this is one way we can make a difference, by being more of who
we are.