Personal branding for career success

Abstract

Branding as a concept has become a necessary and integral part of crafting a successful organisation, product or service. As such branding has become a popular subject for researchers over the last few years. Recently the focus has slowly begun to shift towards the concept of branding people. Branding people is an emerging subject of interest and is slowly gaining leverage among other popular branding methods. Despite the fact that personal branding can provide benefits for both individuals and companies, which has an impact on marketing and human resource management theory, no rigorous research in this area has yet been conducted.This research presents a conceptualisation of people as brand, based on a literature review of product branding concepts that essentially compares people branding with the main schools of thought in branding. In this way a theoretical framework has been developed that takes specific issues related to people brands into account and facilitated in the derivation of a robust conceptualisation of personal branding.The research was conducted using a self-assessment questionnaire administered to 123 knowledge professionals. The research findings showed that the knowledge professionals’ personal brand relied heavily on possessing deep career insights, networking and the acquisition of higher levels of education.