In America, there has been so much social media buzz on personal branding that it is not surprising to find many people being bewildered and confused about this wonderful empowerment concept. Here is Asia, it has been associated with image branding – how to look good to attract employers and with online branding – how to leverage on social media to attract your following. While both branding tools are important to building your brand, personal branding or executive career branding as I call it, is more than just the external communication of one’s unique value.

As a rare Reach Masters’ Branding Strategist, JCTC Career Coach and Leadership advocate, I define Executive Career Branding as a journey of Discovering your Value and Increasing Your Worth.

Most of us work with the intention of building a satisfying, fulfilling and rewarding career or business. In different phases of our work lives, the motivations and goals of our work are different. For some, it could be the monetary rewards that drive them while for others; it could be the significance, recognition or fulfillment factor that keeps them working actively and passionately.

Think of a strong executive career brand as that of a strong corporate brand. Fundamentally strong, customer centric and well-loved companies are driven by their respective missions, visions and purposes to create significant values of their products or services for their customers. The greater the value, the stronger the bond, the higher is the acceptance of the brand.

Similarly, when you create greater value for your organization, the stronger will be your brand. So then, what is value?

The online Accurate and Reliable Dictionary defined value as

The key words to take note of, are aggregate properties or as taught in management theories, we say, THE SUM OF ITS PARTS
In the same context, the value of your personal brand is

These are the ten steps to building a Strong Executive Career Brand which will position you as the Right Candidate for the Organisation.

1. Uncover Your Brand Attributes.
Find out what are people saying about you and discover the positive attributes that attract people to you and the negative ones that caused frustration in others. Your brand is in the hearts and minds of those people around you. It is their opinions of you that are important. You want to be able to communicate a “who you are” message which is clear, consistent and constantly visible so that there is no confusion but confirmation. People tend to “box” others in the way that they can easily remember about the person. Your job is to help them see the best of who you are and what you do through your communications, behaviours and actions.
Reach is the world’s first and leading confidential, web-based personal branding assessment that collects anonymous 360-degree feedback in real time from family, friends, peers, managers, staff, employees, clients, and mentors.

2. Identify Your Core Values.
Our identities are often shaped by our values and these values influence the way we think and how we live our lives.

Values determine our lifestyle priorities and in many ways they also define our goals. Values also explain a lot about who we are as individuals; the choices we make, the decisions we take and the future we create. People’s values also influence their choices of jobs and careers. One way to determine if something is a value is to see how you feel if you violate it.
A friend who has a value of healthy living feels miserable when she eats junk food or does not exercise because she is being inconsistent with one of her most important values.
However, when she takes a vacation to the mountains or hiking and jogs every day, she is filled with energy and optimism.

How about the core value of significance? One of the reasons I left the corporate world to be a career and executive coach is to help middle and senior level executives achieve personal and professional success in their lives. Too often, I have seen executives who are in their prime years of mid 30s to 40s getting burnt out, losing their career compass or whose personal and family lives have been neglected. I had also wanted to spend time with my wife and three children. I wanted to be present to support, coach and play with my children as they grow in their foundational years of childhood and teenage lives

All of us have values even if they are not well defined, at the forefront of our minds. You want to ensure that your critical values are not violated when selecting your job and building your career.

3. Live Out The Purpose Of Your Life
Next, it is also important to discover the purpose of your life as demonstrated in the work you do every day. The purpose of your work reinforces the importance of your values in what you do as an individual. It provides you with an opportunity to demonstrate your self-beliefs and live out your authentic self. Job titles, appointments, positions and status have no bearings in who you are or what you do. I suspect the reason why many executives, who lost their jobs (titles, status, etc.) also lost their self-identities and succumb to depression was the lack of purpose in their lives. Unfortunately, they defined themselves by their achievements, accomplishments and appointments.

When you live on purpose, your job or career is just an opportunity for you to share your thought leadership, serve the people who would benefit from your expertise and support others in improving their lives.

Ask yourself this question, how would you want to be known by the people (clients, bosses, colleagues, peers) whom you have the opportunity to work with? What would your reputation be? What kind of legacy would you be leaving behind?

Have you observed the way that a dedicated doctor reassures his patients, a government official who patiently and painstakingly explains government’s policies to his constituents, a minister preaches a sermon that inspires his congregation, a youth worker who reaches out to troubled teenagers or a CEO who writes notes of encouragement to his employees during times of restructuring, retrenching or resizing?

All these people are purposeful about the work that they do and their purpose is apparent in the way that they do their jobs. When you are purposeful about your work, the joy lights up your face and it shows in everything that you do.

You are enthusiastic and energetic and people that come into contact with you can feel the positive and intense emotions that you feel. Think of Martin Luther King when he delivered that famous and inspirational speech, “I have a dream”. His purpose of ending racial segregation and racial discrimination with the vision of a colour blind society inspired the advancement of human rights in the world today.

4. Be Energised By Your Passions
Passions are activities, interests or conversational topics that fascinate or excite you and make you feel energized. Passions reflect deep, intense emotions about something that you care very much about. You are willing to commit your time, energy and resources into doing them. Like any emotional state, passion waxes and wanes. Sometimes you’re highly motivated. Sometimes you aren’t. Passion has its peaks and valleys but there are some passionate activities which stay the course with you, all through the years. These are the ones where you are most passionate about. In a demanding job environment where peak performance is expected from an executive, you want to ensure that there is an available source of energy which releases the creativity, innovation and productivity into your work.

Confucius said,

“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”

Warren Buffet, Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, Richard Branson, Jeff Bozz amongst others are the ones who have built their successes based on what they love doing.

Warren Buffet

He displayed an amazing aptitude for both money and business at a very early age. Acquaintances recount his uncanny ability to calculate columns of numbers off the top of his head – a feat Warren still amazes business colleagues with today. At only six years old, Buffett purchased 6-packs of Coca Cola from his grandfather’s grocery store for twenty five cents and resold each of the bottles for a nickel, pocketing a five cent profit. At 11 years old, Buffett took his step into the world of high finance.

Steve Jobs

As a child, Steve Jobs preferred doing things by himself. He showed an early interest in electronics and gadgetry. He spent a lot of time working in the garage workshop of his neighbour, who worked as an engineer in Hewlett Packard, an electronics manufacturer.

Jobs also enrolled at HP explorers club. There he saw engineers demonstrate new products and he saw his first computer at the age of 12. He was very impressed and knew right away that he wanted to work with computers.

Walt Disney

Walt had a very early interest in drawing, and art. When he was seven years old, he sold small sketches, and drawings to nearby neighbours. Instead of doing his school work Walt doodled pictures of animals, and nature. His knack for creating enduring art forms took shape when he talked his sister, Ruth, into helping him paint the side of the family’s house with tar.

Besides his other interests, Walt attended McKinley High School in Chicago. There, Disney divided his attention between drawing and photography, and contributing to the school paper. At night he attended the Academy of Fine Arts, to better his drawing abilities.

Besides drawing, Walt had picked up a knack for acting and performing. At school he began to entertain his friends by imitating his silent screen hero, Charlie Chaplin. At his teachers’ invitation, Walt would tell his classmates stories, while illustrating on the chalk board.

Your brand is your REPUTATION. And how you build your reputation depends on how you communicate your unique personal brand to the world. You would need to integrate your value propositions in everything you do to communicate a clear, consistent and visible message to your target audience.

YOUR BRAND RESIDES IN THE HEARTS AND MINDS OF THOSE AROUND YOU

The hard and soft skills are important to your career success and through personal branding, you want to uncover, build and develop those personal soft skills to bond with people, build successful teams and organisations and attract more clients and customers.

Employers want to recruit executives who are an overall fit with their organisations. You, too want to join an organisation which is a good fit for you, given that a successful career requires patience, commitment and importantly, a vision to build.

These are the ten steps to building a Strong Executive Career Brand which will position you as the Right Candidate for the Organisation.

What if like most of us, you did not have the opportunity to build your career from your passions?

One practical way is to find opportunities in and out of the organisation to live out those passions to be fulfilled and to enable you to be energised and visible.

A client, who loves to cook, decided to host her colleagues, bosses, networking friends and business associates at her home for sumptuous meals to deepen her friendships with them.

That same client, who enjoys being communicative and engaging with others, also “resurrected” toastmasters chapters in her company to provide opportunities for young executives and engineers to improve on their speaking and communications skills.

Ask yourself, how could you involve your passions in the work you do?

This would enable you to stand out and be differentiated as people would remember you as someone who is passionate about what you believe in and is willing to go the extra mile for it.

5. Leverage On Your Core Strengths and Motivated Skills To Succeed.
Too many people are using the path of most resistance to achieve career success, thinking that anything can be achieved in life if you adopt the right attitude. Problem with this thinking is in most situations, the costs outweigh the benefits. On the other hand, when strengths and motivated skills are used in most of the work you do, you are able to build on them and develop expertise and thought leadership around these strengths. Your thought leadership would differentiate you as the individual with the unique value proposition and this would enhance your credibility and strengthen your authenticity.

Examples of strengths are identifying problems, seeing the details, leading, delegating, performing analysis, fact finding, crunching numbers, anticipating risk, motivating, mentoring, innovating, managing conflict, writing, listening, communicating.

6. Write Your Top Goals For Next Year, 2 Years and5 years.
Your goals are the road maps that guide you and show you what is possible for your life – Les Brown.

A desired job can be attained in a day but a satisfying, fulfilling and rewarding career is developed through your life long journey of increasing thought leadership, strengthening of your personal brand and your compelling vision and purpose. Start by setting relevant, attainable and targeted goals continuously through the years to achieve maximum results.

7. Identify Your Target Audience
One of the success factors of strong corporate brands is the ability to market to their respective target audiences and one of the biggest headaches for organisations is to have an executive who is a wrong fit with the company.

You cannot be everything to everyone.

You need to know the people and organisations who are important to your career success and work on building those important professional relationships to be heard, known and seen by them. The greater the shared values, missions and purposes, the closer the fit. During job search, spend time gathering information about your impending boss’s leadership qualities, conduct background checks on the organisation’s health and culture and inquire of its future strategies and business prospects. You want to join a passenger cruiser, streaming upstream and not a sunken boat, waiting to be swallowed by the currents.

Next, when you are on brand, there is the confidence and assuredness to articulate your authentic self to people who need to know you. These are the people who appreciate, endorse and will even pay a premium for your services. Your true value is in the hands of these people and your job is to find these “brand ambassadors” and communicate to them your brand value.

What you say, how you say and to whom you say to, impact the value of your brand.

8. Identify Your Competitors And Know Your Differentiations
Truth is there will always be someone who is more qualified and more capable.

Know who you are up against in your job search or job promotion and focus on developing your attributes to be differentiated. Too often, executives spent unnecessary time and wasted energy on curbing the opponents’ influence and powers. What is more effective is to project one’s Unique Promise of Value to attract positive responses from employers.

In a world where collaboration and connection are critical to your career success, it is imperative to build a wider network of friends than foes.

9. Nurture And Expand Your Professional Network
Human beings do not like to be taken advantage of and through professional networks, one’s sincerity and authenticity is revealed by how you participate. It is important to remember that people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. In networking, learn to share, give and help others achieve their goals before you ask for favours. The biblical adage;

“Bless others and you will be blessed” accurately reflects the spirit of networking. Be ready to serve and as others see the servitude and positive attributes of you, people will be motivated to help you achieve your goals.

10. Develop Your Online Presence
With social media engineering the way we work, communicate and collaborate with others, any executive who is serious about building a strong executive brand presence needs to leverage on the use of these communication tools. Your email signature, professional headshot, LinkedIn profile, personal blog of your thought leadership, tweets, facebook and other forms of social connectivity are excellent and affordable platforms to build, increase and enhance your personal executive brand. In fact, your reputation can be tarnished or enhanced by the strokes of your pen and it is advisable to err on the side of caution when publishing your comments and thoughts.
However, when your focus is on providing value to benefit others, social media can be hugely useful in increasing your visibility and enhancing your credibility.


Executive communications is about engaging your audience with provoking, positive and possible perspectives for the purpose of learning, sharing and exchanging of views.

In victories and in setbacks, there are always important learnings to inquire and acquire, new and fresh thinkings to embrace and more effective and productive behaviours to adopt. And that is the human potential of life that empowers us to climb mountains, swim across oceans, run through deserts and achieve the inconceivables!

Indeed, Christmas and New Year symbolise the birth of hope, destiny and vision. It represents a turning point in that the old is gone and the new has come.

May 2011 brings you greater success in your personal and professional lives.

THE MOUNTAIN 
by Kathleen Delicato

Looking up into the heights, the sky blue,
I begin my ascent of the mountain.
With my first step, steady, honest and true,
My heart's filled with the goal I shall attain.
Though as I reach the higher paths I find
Determination begins to waver.
The rocks and icy winds are so unkind
And erode the courage I did savor.
T'would be easy to give up and go back,
Return to my safe and comforting home.
Then my inner voice cries, "Attack, attack!"
So I grit my teeth and push myself on.
When I reach the summit, see all I've gained,
Well worth all the trials, well worth all the pain.
_________________________________________________ 

MY HOPE FOR YOU
by Frankie Mao

It's never easy to go through trials, especially knowing that you are destined for better things.
And how destiny unfolds before us is something that we can never fathom
But one thing is for sure
As long as you continue to believe in yourself, all things will work out for those who persevere

Perhaps you can find rest and energy in doing activities which you are passionate about
Think of time-outs where you can re-energise yourself and strengthen your mental abilities and expand your physical capacities
Look for those kind of productive activities and develop them
Nourish your soul and renew your mind
You are capable of doing more
Time is on your side
As you start your new day, ask yourself,
"What can you do today that will bring you closer to your vision?"

I wish you well, knowing that all these things will strengthen you in the course of time

Happy Holidays!
Warmest Regards,
Frankie Mao
Executives Branding
….discover your value, increase your worth..

However, good talent is still highly valued by companies and good talent with  an area of expertise or thought leadership is even more highly prized. Strong personal brands demonstrate expertise and thought leadership in their areas of work. Not surprisingly, they are highly sought after by organisations.

Strong brands are known not for many things, but that one special thing which sets them apart from the rest of the competition. I would like to share with you 3 steps to being a thought leader.

Identifying Your Thought Leadership
1. What is the ultimate career goal that you have always dreamt of accomplishing?
2. What is the vision you see yourself building, developing or creating?
3. How can you use this expertise as part of your mission to serve a community, country or world?
4. What was your greatest achievement so far?
5. What awards, recognition or commendations did you receive in the past?
6. What is it that you enjoy doing and would likely continue to do so in the future?

Developing Your Thought Leadership
1. What are the ways that you can develop your expertise? Think of courses and seminars to attend, professional networks to join, qualifications to attain, mentors who can help you grow, etc?
2. Develop your 5-year and 10-year plan to learn and grow professionally. Write them down.
3. What are the opportunities that you can seek to share, practice and work on this? It's the culmination of the small steps you take which bring you to the top of the ladder.

Standing Out For Your Thought Leadership
1. What projects can you work on to achieve recognition, awards and credibility from people or organisations? Endorsement by others is essential to being acknowledged as a thought leader.
2. How can you communicate your thought leadership to others? Think of blogging, articles submission, audio and video recordings, writing books, giving talks, conferences, forming groups, etc
3. Include components of your thought leadership in your daily communications with people, like your tagline, personal brand statement, elevator pitch, videobio, tweets, blogposts, other type of messages. Some of these can be used as your email signatures.

Finally, achieving the recognition of being a thought leader of your field in your group, department, organisation, industry or country requires the passion to see it through. That is why it is not surprising that many well-known thought leaders like Steve Jobs, Warren Buffet, Jeff Bezos, Walt Disney and many others started off as individuals who were unknowns, unrecognised and unbelieving.

Speaking to an audience that included entrepreneurs, staff and 80 student leaders from Hwa Chong Institution (HCI) on Wednesday, Mr Tharman said Singaporeans are satisfied with being competent at what they do, with few striving to be exceptional.
This, he said, is a challenge that the country will need to overcome.
He then called on younger students in the audience to push for excellence in their chosen area and said, “We shouldn’t be afraid of being different and wanting to make a difference.”

Indeed in the new world of work, mediocrity and conformity are enemies to innovation and creativity. To be differentiated, you need to stand out for your unique promise of value. I want to share my thoughts on the pursuit of excellence to achieving a satisfying, fulfilling and rewarding career.

1) DO WHAT YOU LOVE.
When you do what you love, you will love what you do. Work then does not merely become a job and work is more than just a title. In fact, work is an expression of who you are and work is a service of what you do.  We want to be recognized, satisfied, fulfilled and rewarded for the work we do. When you are enjoying and loving your work, you actually give yourself permission to be yourself, knowing that the desire is to experience the joys and satisfaction of your contributions to your organisations and to others. Unfortunately, people are too focused on achieving their jobs’ responsibilities that they shortchanged themselves in doing less. Many of us are capable of doing more. It is sad when organisations put too much emphasis on jobs’ roles and responsibilities in recruitment, performance appraisals and job promotions. Instead, bosses and leaders should grant executives the right to write down their work descriptions that they love doing and are excited about and not job descriptions which merely sought to address the basic objectives of the positions.

2) USE YOUR STRENGTHS AND DEVELOP THEM INTO THOUGHT LEADERSHIP AND EXPERTISE.
Identify your core strengths and find opportunities to use, work and develop them. At an early age, Warren Buffet possessed an uncanny ability to calculate columns of numbers off the top of his head.  At 6 years old, he was trading packs of Coca Cola from his grandfather’s grocery store for a profit. At 11 years old, he entered the world of finance and purchased shares for investment.
As a child, Apple’s Steve Jobs preferred doing things by himself.  He showed an early interest in electronics and gadgetry. He spent a lot of time working in the garage workshop of a neighbour and when he saw his first computer at the age of twelve, he was very impressed, and knew right away that he wanted to work with computers.
In his book, Strengths Finder 2.0, Tom Rath of Gallup Organisation lamented about how many of us used the path of most resistance in our journeys to success.

3) STAND OUT FOR YOUR UNIQUE PROMISE OF VALUE
People are like  raw diamonds, waiting to be uncovered, discovered and polished to be like gems; valuable and high prized. Your unique value is a combination of both your rational and emotional attributes that differentiate you from the rest of the competition. While your rational and technical competencies position you as an expert in that area of focus, the emotional abilities like creativity (for accountants) and communication (for engineers) stand out as the differentiations that would project the executives as able to excel beyond the usual job descriptions.

4) BE A BRAND THAT CONTINUALLY GROWS STRONGER
Weak brands focus on profits and costs to survive. Strong brands focus on people and value to thrive.
In today’s globalised world, competition is everywhere and at every moment. To excel, one has to learn to collaborate, network and work togather with others to be ahead of the curve. There will always be new frontiers to conquer and new areas to be discovered. It is no longer that profitable to meet the needs of customers; that model is for those who are on survival mode. To excel in what you do, you have to meet the aspirations and ambitions of others and to do that, your values, passions, missions, life purposes and visions need to be communicated to be connected with them. People want to be engaged, enabled and empowered to live extraordinary lives which when you think of it, is also aligned to how we want to live.
Mission inspires, purpose reinforces, values align, vision drives and passion energises.

Differentiation Is Strength

With Asian economies remaining fundamentally sound and the job market slowly getting tighter, retaining the high potentials and talented achievers is going to be a challenging task for many organisations.

It is important to recognise that these individuals are not your ordinary employees who are concerned about job security and stability. On the contrary, they are self assured and confident executives who want to find greater understanding of who they are and what they do. In fact for many, the motivation is to live satisfying, fulfilling and rewarding lives.

As organisations, you may want to think about these questions when managing these talented high potentials.

● Is your organisation engaging these high achievers holistically?
Mission inspires, purpose aligns, vision drives and passion energises
● As self-assured and passionate Individuals, has the organization helped them to develop their purposes and visions?
● Are their core values aligned to the organisation’s values?
● There is no separation between work and life.
Work is life, life is work.
● They are proud of who they are. Has your company enabled  them to develop their own personal brands, knowing that there are great synergies between their own brands and the organisation’s brand?
● Satisfying, fulfilling and rewarding careers are what they are after. Have their aspirations and ambitions been met?

SINGAPORE:
Oon Jin Teik, the chief executive officer of the Singapore Sports Council (SSC), has tendered his resignation. The 47-year-old CEO’s last day in office will be December 31, 2010.
In a statement to the media on Friday, Mr Oon said he was heading back to the private sector after six-and-a-half years at the council.
Mr Oon joined the SSC in 2004.
His helm at the SSC has seen significant developments in the sports scene.
Among them is institutionalising a systematic sports delivery system.
Other contributions include Singapore’s success at the elite level in major competitions, as well as international recognition for events like the F1 and Youth Olympic Games.

The former national swimmer will join the private sector in January, as group executive vice president with Hyflux, a Singapore listed global integrated environmental solutions company.

What a wonderful testimony of a C-suite executive who served in a non-profitable organisation is rewarded with a career stint in a business organisation. Certainly, his ability to stand out in SSC as a CEO who is vision minded and achievement-oriented has attracted interest from private companies who are always looking for good talent. His passion in sports and his mission to make a difference to Singapore’s sports community have profiled him as a person with deep convictions and a purpose-driven individual. In leadership appointments, these emotional attributes are just as important, if not more important than credentials and accomplishments.

I sincerely wish Mr Oon all the best in his future endeavours with Hyflux and may he continue to inspire, empower and enable the organisation to higher levels of success just as what he had done with SSC.

It Points Towards Your Success

In Personal Branding through a series of personal introspection facilitated by a qualified, certified and experienced strategist and coach, your personal brand statement is developed.

This statement which represents your authentic self encapsulates everything about you - your values, passions, talents, target audience, purpose and vision. Some say it operates like a personal mission statement. Similar but not the same. A personal mission statement is often developed out of a burning desire to do something good for a larger entity like a group, community or society. While the personal mission statement operates out of a higher purpose of nobility, morality or righteousness, the fact is many individuals find it extremely challenging and difficult to fulfill those personal missions. Why? Because hope and desire are not enough to fuel those motivations to accomplish the mission. Values, passions, talents and other components of the core self are necessary ingredients to energise, guide and inspire the individual to achieve what is often seen as an impossible mission. 

And this is where, the personal brand statement is able to guide the individual towards focusing on achieving the mission.

Let me highlight the case study of an exceptional strong brand which has taken the world by storm, APPLE INC.

Extracted from Alvin of Devdaily.com, Tim Cook of Apple regarding Apple’s business philosophy (mission statement), said:

Think of Ya Kun, the kaya toast coffee stall which rose from its obscurity as a stall in Telok Ayer Transit Market to become Singapore’s famous coffee chain with many outlets around the island and also in Asia.
How did it become such a popular brand? Through branding, of course.

Does branding then, mean that if a product or service can be packaged with the right marketing strategies, it could be transformed into an iconic brand?
The answer is partly correct but the most critical component of branding is not the packaging.

Can you imagine if one day, Ya Kun gets into the business of selling jewellery and precious stones?
Would you patronize and spend thousands of dollars on the merchandise? Probably not and would Ya Kun be able to command a successful franchise business as a jewellery chain? Not likely, isn’t it?
So even if Ya Kun engages the best marketing or image brand consultant, the goal of being a successful jewellery store would not still be achieved. In fact, there could be a possibility that this confusion could cause Ya Kun serious damage to its original brand equity.
And that’s why Personal Branding is all about Authenticity. You cannot fake something which are not your strengths and expect your employers or target market to believe your pitch.

I would like to share with you the critical reasons why Ya Kun is so highly successful today.

1)      Identifying Its Core Strength (the Unique Promise of Value)
Ya Kun’s strength is in making delicious, delectable traditional coffee and other local food and beverage products. By harnessing on its strength and developing a unique value proposition around it, Ya Kun was able to stand out and be differentiated from the rest of the competition.  By working with the brand professionals, Ya Kun’s down to earth coffeeshop stable of coffee, tea, egg and toast was transformed into a Unique Promise of Value brand which attracts the hearts and minds of people of all ages. If it had been left to its own ideas and imagination, Ya Kun may not have reached this level of success so quickly.

2)      Build The Brand Consistently
Ya Kun did not become a success overnight. The first stall was started by the late Loi Ah Kun in his teens sometime in the 1920s. In 1998, the children of the late Mr Loi decided to modernize the operations and embraced branding Ya Kun, with a new look, providing key deliverables and positioning itself in the right market.  Through the process of extracting, expressing and exuding, Ya Kun was gradually transformed to what it is today. And Ya Kun knows that the brand evolution is a journey and not an end it itself. Consciously, it has to keep focusing on building its brand to attain recognition, endorsement and satisfaction amongst its customers.
How about you? Has your career reached a plateau where you find yourself stucked and nowhere to go? Do you have a plan or strategy to strengthen you career brand every year or is it a case of touch and go? Just like Ya Kun, would branding be the catalyst to propel your career into the next league?

3)      Increasing Visibility Of Its Business
With the evolution of Ya Kun into a brand, the company embarked on creating visibility of its products and services by setting up shops in neighbour hood malls to capture the attention of its target market – local Singaporeans who could identify with its stable. As the company seeks to grow regionally, it embarked on a strategy of attracting customers from neighbouring countries by firstly setting up a store at Singapore’s Changi Airport and then exporting the Ya Kun brand overseas.
Today, the Ya Kun brand is known locally and regionally and perhaps in the near future, globally as well. 
In the same thinking, how have you grown your career brand locally, regionally or even globally?
Some of the steps you can take to building your visibility are
a. Speaking at local or regional conferences
b. Submission of articles, journals to industry specific magazines
c. Volunteering in your profession related organisations to serve and contribute
d. Networked with fellow professionals
e. Join clubs, societies where your potential employers are found
f.  Communicate your Unique brand to the people that matter. Often people do not know your strengths, thought leadership and expertise no matter how small it may be. Key point is to be known for something which is extraordinary, even if it is your passion.

While Ya Kun is a story which is set in Singapore, I am sure that there are similar stories of success in your own countries. The fact is without branding, you may remain as an unpolished gem waiting to be discovered but with personal branding, the brand, YOU has that possibility of achieving recognition, compensation and status befitting of many corporate brands.