Starting a personal brand is the hardest but most fulfilling project that I have completed in my college career. It challenged me to learn new skills and think about what I want to do after college, and overall, it made me a better marketer.
Thinking of yourself as a brand is not an easy task. When I think of brands, I think of products I see while shopping. Speaking of shopping, a personal brand can give you that step above the other candidates when employers shop for that perfect employee.
To start a personal brand, you need to start a creative brief. A creative brief contains all the information about a brand, including the target market, the problem(s), the brand's values, objectives, and more. Having the format of the creative brief forces you to start thinking about how to define your brand and gives you the framework to do it.
As a heads up, completing this creative brief and being happy with how it turns out is a hard process. Each section in my creative brief took many iterations, time, and thinking.
Problem Statement
Identifying the problem is one of the most important parts of marketing. If you are trying to solve a problem the market doesn't have, your product won't do well. Luckily there is a framework to ensure you have a fully thought-out but condensed problem. Having it be too lengthy may take away from what you are trying to say.
Remember that the creative brief is developed with a customer-focused point of view, meaning the problem you try to solve with your brand should be a problem your customer is facing, not yours. My problem statement looks like
As I was taking the screenshot to show my problem statement, even now, I am thinking about how I can make it better. Don't be afraid to change; realize that your first draft shouldn't be your last.
Value Proposition
Creating a value proposition may sound easy but it is not. It may be easy to complete but it is hard to master. The value proposition ties into the marketing mix and helps creatives understand what differentiates them. Below is the framework for making a value proposition:
The easy part of this process is the “we help” section, where it is defining what your target market is. The hard part is creating that unique service that helps solve the customer's problem.
My value proposition is not perfect by any means but does represent what I am trying to do and gave me a good starting point to keep developing the rest of my brand.
Brand Elements and Wrap-Up
Another crucial part, and one of the most exciting, is creating the brand elements such as colors, logos, and fonts. Luckily I have already written a blog on how I came up with all of my brand elements which you can read here.
To summarize, what I talked about in that blog is basically what I have been talking about here, which is to deliver value early and often and not wait for it to be perfect before moving on. I found inspiration on how to improve my elements by moving on and thinking about the rest of the process. If I could go back to when I was starting all this, I would have started the process earlier in the quarter rather than waiting for the perfect time. If you would like to check out the rest of my creative brief, click here!
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