Hello again, in this presentation, we'll discuss the skilled self, as a brand. The theme of personal branding, is the subject matter in week three. We'll demonstrate, that this theme goes beyond self marketing, and touches upon many aspects, of how a person can create, and use social capital, for career development, and personal growth. In this presentation, we'll provide some definitions of brands, and branding in the marketing literature, and see how they can be used in the career development context. Then, we'll invite you to conduct some career branding exercises in the career development lab. Brands, and branding are popular, and important concepts in marketing literature. In professional services marketing, which is the closest to the career development subset of marketing theory, brand is defined, as the customer's perception of the firm's, or in our case, a skilled professional's, capabilities to deliver a high quality service. The role of the brand, is to communicate, and assure value, guarantee high performance, build trust, create relationship, and provide visibility. In marking literature, you can find many specific terms related to brands, and branding, for example, brand image, brand identity, brand promise, brand personality, brand awareness, brand equity, and many others. The American Marketing Association maintains a website that includes a dictionary of marketing terms. There are some great website developed by marketing consultants, and companies such as, dotme.com. If you go through branding terminology, you may notice that some of the terms are repetitive, some are only interesting for researchers. The important thing, is that you should not confuse the two ways of dealing with brands. On one hand, brands can be solely viewed on the customer's side, as their perceptions. On the other hand, sellers, or in our case career developers, can actively engage in creating desired images, and transporting them to customers. Finally, in the commercial world, the term brand is often used anonymously with product, but this is not what we meant by brand in the course. In the world of branding, there's one particular concept that we would like you to become familiar with, it's called brand equity. You may also call it brand capital, in accounting, they call it goodwill. In a nutshell, brand equity is a tangible outcome of branding, for example, it is the difference between the cost of manufacturing a branded product, and the price that consumers pay for it, or it is the residual value of a branded business, when the total cost of it's material asset is taken out. Please note, that it is the brand equity that makes us understand, that all this talk about perceptions, has real cash value, we'll continue this conversation in a minute. The idea of self-branding in relation to career growth became popular in the 1990s, particularly after Peters published his book, Brand You. If you Google, personal branding, you'll find plenty of self help books, and blogs, many of them are actually very good. In this course, we do not want to summarize those resources, as they keep evolving daily. Our goal, is to connect brand building with skill building, and provide a holistic approach to career self management, with the use of some self coaching tools. To understand brands, it's better to think about them, as a means to translate complex messages, and convert them into emotions, and desires, for example, what is Nike, Ferrari, Apple? It is a product, quality of life, a challenge, a dream? In marketing literature, you can read about the brand pyramid that encapsulates the whole spectrum of meanings, and levels of involvement. At this point we'd like to ask you to think about a brand pyramid of your own, what elements would you include in your brand pyramid? In what order? How do you think they're going to promote your professional image, and help you grow, and get a dream job? To help you begin, let me ask you a few questions, let's begin with an easy one. Do you think that education is relevant, the type of institution you attend, the type of degree you earned? Years ago, a good degree, or any degree, opened doors, it has changed since then, but degrees still do matter. This is information that can be easily communicated in a resume, if it is important for the employer that you graduated from, say Caltech, then they may recall it, and think about you, as a Caltech guy, if they do then you know that your brand exists, at least they can recall it. What's next? The next question is about your functional skills. Is there anything that you can demonstrate in a uniquely memorable way? Something that can help you stand out, even if all other candidates have comparable skills? This is where a well chosen artifact can create a point of difference. The next question is about your personality, of course many job candidates can be creative, resilient, and adaptive, but try to prove it in an unusual, and emotional way, and create a more powerful impression. Now, this is time to ask you the most important question, are you ready? What do you think is a tangible outcome of career branding? How can you measure it? The thing is, that if you can identify, pinpoint, and measure the outcome of career branding, then you can manage it, and use it for your career success. To measure tangible outcomes of career branding, it's logical to use the concept of brand equity. We can define a person's career brand equity, as the surplus, and his or her evaluation by employers, and colleagues caused by career branding activities. You may think about it this way, if there are two job candidates, Peter and Paul, with more, or less equivalent functional skills, but one of them, Peter, has designed a more powerful professional image, his present job market value is going to be higher, than the one of Paul. To explore this approach in more detail, we invite you to the career development lab, see you there.
