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ABSTRACT
Personal branding is a new marketing phenomenon related to the marketing effort that a person adopts in order to promote oneself in the market. The academic literature examining it is still under-developed and the popular nature of the phenomenon among practitioners invites further examination. In this paper, we conceptualize a personal branding as a three-stage process: (1) developing a personal brand identity involves investing in cultural capital and social capital within established organizational fields, (2) managing a brand's position by actively seeking to manage impressions through artifactual, non verbal behaviors, and verbal strategies; (3) assessing a personal brand requires engaging in a reflexivity-in-action and reflexivity-on-action.
Introduction
Personal branding is a new marketing phenomenon related to the marketing effort that a person adopts in order to promote oneself in the market. The popularization of personal branding is generally attributed to the rising number of books on the subject, magazines, web sites, training programs, personal coaches, and specialized literature about how exactly to brand oneself for success in the business world (Arruda and Dixson, 2007; McNally and Speak 2002; Montoya, 2002, Nessmann, 2010, Rein, Kotier, Hamlin & Stoller, 2006).
Kotier and Levy (1969) noted that no attempt is made to examine whether the principles of good marketing in traditional product areas are transferable to the marketing of services, persons, and ideas. They argued that persons could be marketed much like products, stating that personal marketing is an endemic human activity, from the employee trying to impress his boss to the statesman trying to win the support of the public.
Human brands refer to the persona, well-known or emerging, who are the subject of marketing, interpersonal, or inter-organizational communications (Thomson, 2006). Today researchers recognize that brands can also be human because they: 1) can be strategically managed and 2) have additional associations and features of a brand (Close, Moulard, & Monroe, 2010). The key premise for personal branding is that everyone has a personal brand (Peters, 1997), but most people are not aware of this and do not manage it strategically, consistently, and effectively (Ramparsad, 2009). A major selling proposition is the fear that if individuals don't manage their own brand, then someone else will manage it for them (Kaputa, 2003).
Personal brand has been...