This is Stephen. He sells The Big Issue outside Charing Cross station. Do you recognize him? He quite literally ‘stands out’ by holding this amusing pose for ages, breaking it only when customers spend their £2.50 on a paper designed to help people get back to work and up on their feet again.

What’s that got to do with personal branding? Well there are lots of people around London selling The Big Issue, but I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that when I buy one from Stephen I’m going to leave the transaction uplifted. He’s going to make me smile. His attitude and his daft stance brings smiles all around.

If Stephen were a brand and not just a person, one of his main brand attributes might be ‘uplifting’. My expectation of an interaction with that brand would be set...I’m going to be uplifted.

Jeff Bezos (of Amazon fame) once said that a brand is what people are saying about you when you are not in the room. It’s interesting that he chose a very human dynamic and applied it to a corporate brand. Can the analogy work the other way? Why not apply corporate branding approaches to yourself?

My day job is helping major global brands get stronger on their good days and protected during the bad days of crisis. Essentially, you want the brand to stay true to its values whether it’s having a good or bad day.

People are central to a successful outcome in either scenario and over the years I have found myself increasingly asked to extend communication training into full blown executive coaching. With that in mind, last year I joined 15 other executive coaches seeking to complete their Professional Certificate in Executive Coaching at the excellent Henley School of Management. I was struck by how much of what I learned about people could be applied to brands and vice versa.

So, if you were a brand, what would your brand attributes be? What would people expect when anticipating contact with you? Are you a problem solver? Calm in a crisis? Do you hang back with your opinion before nailing it at the close? Are you super-creative and excitable? Do you deliver on your promises? Do you have attention to detail or leave that to others? If you want a clue as to how your personal brand is shaping up, dive deep into your filing cabinet and pull out that last 360 degree feedback document HR gave you. Do you see any trends among your colleagues’ comments? Positive or negative, those are your perceived brand attributes. Are you happy with them?

Developing a personal brand. You need to start with a pretty clear view of who you are so that you avoid the pitfalls of trying to be something you’re not. This is about enhancing your strengths and managing your weaknesses. A 360° feedback process is helpful but to really gain insight I’d recommend some psychometric analysis. An approach I’ll be introducing in 2016 is to offer a session with a chartered occupational psychologist who uses market leading psychometric profiling to bring clarity to a person’s strengths and weaknesses. This will help myself and the person being coached craft a realistic and attainable personal brand that reflects reality rather than pure aspiration.

So how to surface the positive attributes of an individual? In her book 'The Coach’s Coach'¹ Alison Hardingham suggests executive coaches encourage visualisation to help people become clearer as to how they might wish to be seen. She describes a technique she calls the ‘Praise Party.’ With apologies to Alison for this truncated version, try it!