What do you say when people ask you, “What are you doing?” or “What is your job?” If you are like most people, please respond with your job title or the industry you are in or the company you work for. And THAT is what makes most people generic, replaceable, and just one more cog in the eyes of the people they care about professionally. The key distinction is: are you a job title or a personal brand?

The difference between a job and a personal brand

Let me explain what I mean. You have two options when you want to talk about what you do. You can decide if you want to be generic or specific. It can be a job title or a personal brand. Everything depends on you. For example, you can say, “I am a nutritionist.” Or you can say, “I treat your child’s illness with my exclusive diets.” Another example: you can say, “I am a real estate agent.” Or you can say, “No matter how bad your credit is, I can help you buy the property of your choice.” The difference is in the “promise”. A job title is simply a word or phrase that broadly describes what you do. However, a specific response communicates to your audience a unique promise of value: a statement of what your personal brand stands for. When you consider yourself a job title, you are not implying that you are uniquely and authentically relevant to your clients. On the other hand, when you consider yourself a personal brand, you tell people what you do, who you do it for and, most importantly, why they should care (how you are different).

Components of a brand introduction

So there are three parts to a strong brand introduction:

1. who is your target audience: for example, I work with service professionals who want to get more clients.
2. what benefit their work brings them: I help them find their unique value promise and how they can stand out from the crowd.
3. How are you different: I not only use my consulting and coaching tools, but I also take advantage of my 16 years of experience working with more than 30,000 people

How can you weave these three into a very short and interesting story about what you do for a living? (See my previous examples)

Says Seth Godin: “There are proven strategies that generic products can use to make someone more likely to find them. Name your new book with all kinds of keywords in the title, for example, to rank higher organically. high.for those same keywords …

The alternative is to create a product that earns enough of a reputation that people decide to talk about it, choose to argue about it, choose to search for it. It is not something like that, but that.

It is good that they find it. Essential to be searched.

This was always a good idea, but in a post-mobile and social media search era, it’s now the best idea. “

Now the question remains: Are you a job title or a personal brand?