Nowadays, marketing is an essential part of any business and people are investing tons of money to promote their product, specifically their brand. There many techniques usually used to achieve a high level of a brand recognition and creating a value of a product. According to Phillip Kotler and John T. Bowen (2014) the marketing process includes the following steps:
understand the marketplace and client needs and wishes
develop a customer-driven marketing strategy
develop an integrated marketing program that provides superior value
construct profitable and beneficial relationships and create customer satisfaction.
At last, businesses will capture the customers’ value in order to become profitable and gain the customer capital (Kotler, Bowen, & Makens, 2014). No wonder that such a model can be applied when promoting the personal brand. The main reason to have a developed and recognized personal brand is to create demand on a person as a worker between potential employers (they are the customers in such case). So how can people use marketing to promote his or her personal brand?
First, it is necessary to understand and determine a very specific field of proficiency and, what is more important, to review what the employers need and want to see in their potential worker. The most advantageous way is to conduct a short research on the most successful resumes and CVs on LinkedIn and other job seeking networks. This will follow the person to the second step, which is developing an employer(customer)-driven strategy. It is creating a competitive resume in regards to the chosen field and results of the mentioned research. Also, a person has to create a specific promotion strategy of his or her resume using social networks, blogs, attending different career fairs etc. This should include at least two concepts: product (person) concept and selling concept (Kotler, Bowen, & Makens, 2014). It means a person has to determine who the “product” is and how this “product” should be sold on a market.
The steps described above will lead a person to developing an integrated marketing plan. It will outline the employers who should be interested in the “product” and the value this “product” provides. Thus, it will build a specific relationship between employers and the “product”. Finally, the person should transform the results of the first three steps into an action in order to build the profitable relationship and make his or her personal brand highly recognized and demanded (Kotler, Bowen, & Makens, 2014). Only the fourth step requires specific actions on the market. At this time, the person should actually start to sell the brand.
Most of the personal branding is the usual marketing approach seeing a person as a product and determination of his or her personal utility for the customer, who is an employer (Halvorson, 2012). "Sell yourself" - this statement may seem somewhat cynical. But sales is the foundation of any business. And if someone has an independent development strategy, if the corporation of "You" already has its mission, goals and strategy, it cannot go without a good brand management, marketing, and sales. Then the personal corporation can definitely change something in this world. Personal brand gives a person a huge opportunity in terms of freedom of the formation of his or her own careers. Specialist representing the "untwisted brand" is a much-demanded product on the employers' market.
References
Halvorson, H. (2012). The Surprising Secret to Selling Yourself. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2012/08/the-surprising-secret-to-selli
Kotler, P., Bowen, J., & Makens, J. (2014). Marketing for hospitality and tourism. Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education Limited.
