Machaz H., Shokoofh, K. (2016). Personal Branding: An Essential Choice?

From Digital Culture & Society

Machaz, H., & Shokoofh, K. (2016). Personal Branding: An Essential Choice? Journal of Multidisciplinary Research, 8(2), 65-70.

Carmen Kang

Traditional marketing tends to involve simple strategies that have the potential to organize an individual's best interest of a brand, and manage to showcase those to the public. In return, this tactic is able to portray the heights of success and projection of a brand, thanks to the work of a group of individuals that are typically behind the scenes. With the help of charts, graphs and statistics to monitor growth and development, traditional marketing has consistently managed to uproot a business and better it. However, millennials and newer generations have managed to rework these strategies to become bolder than they have ever been before. This goes hand in hand with the emergence and high level of success of social media.

Machaz and Shokoofh (2016) discuss the ways in which social media has worked along with millennials to change the outlook of marketing for the better. Marketing has always revolved around branding, which ultimately connected to products and drawing consumers into a trend. But with services offered through the Internet, personal branding has now become the new version of branding of services. Rather than fully representing a brand, individuals feel inclined to represent themselves in addition to said brands.

This can easily transition into a focus of strict personal branding, which turns the self identity into a brand identity. In the case of artists, actors/actresses, or musicians, a personality has usually always been associated with the brand. But now individuals are able to take their personality, and their interests and turn those into their own brand. With the help of social media, this provides individuals with a job as well as a following, like an audience or set of consumers. From here, the authors enter a brief explanation of why personal branding is as important as millennials feel it is. A summarized explanation of this delves into profiles becoming potential representatives when considering a candidate for a job or even for individuals to choose how they would like to be seen by the public when creating a brand.

Then the authors focus on the potential issues that one should beware of when creating or promoting a digital personal brand. This could involve unprofessional statements, or inappropriate photos. Both of these also depend on the type of brand that one may be representing or forming. Machaz and Shokoofh then go on to discuss how to enter a realm of personal branding. They present the idea of it being difficult to separate the identities of one’s social and work profile. This returns to the idea of being sensible about what is being posted before posting. There are also questions one can ask themselves, such as is this on brand or is this proper for brand representation?

To further simplify this equation or series of questions, the authors provided four phases that could introduce a safe and efficient entryway to personal branding. Phase one would be to define and formulate your personal ambition, which essentially means to figure out what exactly it may be that you want to represent and work for. The second would be to define and formulate your personal brand, which means to discover what it is that your brand will showcase. The third would be to formulate your personal balanced scorecard and finally fourth is to implement and cultivate your personal ambition, personal brand and personal balanced scorecard.

If all of these are done correctly and efficiently, it is close to impossible that a brand would not be successful. This four step process would be considered a major strength throughout this source as it provides steps that seem fool proof to preparing a personal brand. The authors also provide detail as to how these phases work through to prove passions, and repel negative connotations. Since these steps create an organized basis, it almost seems impossible to lose track of the main goal of a recently or newly formed brand.

However, a major weakness in this article would be that this does not provide a completely detailed explanation of the phases. Since each almost seems self explanatory, the authors and previous writers do not provide much of an explanation. In the sense of seeming fool proof, this could backfire, as they lack description.

The article works to provide many insights to personal branding, while providing some obvious and new terms and processes. Machaz and Shokoofh both work to prove how these tactics can work, and emphasize simple yet effective processes for an individual who may just be entering the world of personal branding.