Aligning corporate and personal brand

18 February 2020
|In F8 Think
|By famigliaeight

Never has business and personal brand alignment been more important than it is in this age of over-exposure. Who you really are, what you care about and what creatively inspires your deeper self is a direct reflection of how you do business, the ways through which you engage with your audience and how you aspire to implement change in the world. Our corporate brands are the mirror extensions of how we perceive ourselves; building an honest corporate brand is an extension of our business, a journey for the real innovation and a constant evolutionary process. And this alignment is even more important in the services sector; the professionals dealing with strategy and business development, the marketeers and campaign directors, the people who sell their knowledge and time, need to align themselves with what they put on the table. The two must match seamlessly.

The rhetoric is simple:

✓ brands have been humanised through online access to their founders

✓ businesses share their behind-the-office moments to unveil their corporate culture, social responsibility and operational ethos

✓ there is a deep urge to come closer together after our global involuntary isolation

The Personal Balanced Scorecard (PBSC)

Your personal brand has no value unless you materialise and deliver on this promise. The essential cycle for this revolves around: WHAT YOU WANT TO DO, HOW TO ARTICULATE IT, HOW TO MAKE IT ACTIONABLE.

WHAT YOU WANT TO DO: your ideals, ambitions, intentions, needs, deep desires

HOW TO ARTICULATE IT: how do you say what you want to do, what is your tone of voice and choice of words in establishing credibility and alignment?

  • What You Want To Do: is there consistency between what you are saying and what you are doing? Are your thoughts and your practices the same?

Implement and cultivate the corporate brand (Corporate Balanced Scorecard – CBSC)

You need to implement your corporate brand to make it a reality and make consistent efforts to grow your corporate brand awareness. This calls for a complete understanding of what the brand IS and how it is MAINTAINED through time. The more you strengthen, maintain, and cultivate the corporate brand, the more successful the company will be; and the more you strengthen, maintain and cultivate yourself, the bigger the positive impact thi is likely to have on your business.

Maintaining checks and balances

Being able to cross-check if your personal and corporate brand are in alignment is all about maintaining checks and balances; I find this even more imperative in the world of creative consultancy. Imagine a client meets you for the first time. The project brief is simple: a new brand for a homeware white linen collection, from start to finish. Your tasks are enormous: you are essentially creating a whole new brand, for someone else, from naming to design, business development and marketing, to media exposure and complete brand development. The client sits down with you for a quick lunch and realises that the way you dress, talk and hold the fork have nothing to do with the people they want their brand to be used by. This is the incremental test of all times: for a new client to be convinced to work with you, they have to believe that you are a potential client too or, at the very least, understand what the potential client should look like. You have to articulate your personal brand with love and passion, be committed to change, and improve your perceived value in the marketplace and yourself continuously.

In the world of services, who you are matters as much as what your brand does; the two are inextricably linked. If you are truly serious to professionally grow, you have to put yourself in a position where others can see and hear what you have to offer. A personal brand can help you separate personal exposure from personal brand exposure too; you are not sharing too much because what you do is who you are. Faithfully following this brand alignment can only lead to unlimited growth both personally and professionally.