Personal Branding

What is your brand?

How do you see yourself?

How do others see you?

For £49.99 (incl. tax), you can:

• assess your own brand
• ask friends and colleagues to assess your brand
• work out who you really are

1. Free demo – the free demo of our personal branding tools is a self-assessment using George Herbert Mead’s “I/Me” concept. To try it, click here.
2. When you have found the I/Me self-assessment insightful, we have a suite of three further self-assessments, based on the work of key psychologists, priced at £49.99 for all three (inclusive of all taxes). You can also invite up to 10 friends/colleagues to participate. To access these, please contact us at enquiries@mudvalley.co.uk

In more detail

The discipline of psychology provides many tools to help us build and re-examine our brands. Brand marketing is a deeply psychological process.

These tools are used for developing corporate brands (especially George Kelly’s laddering technique), but they started out addressing the psychology of individuals.

In order to have an effective personal brand, there are 3 things we need to bring together:

• How we see ourselves
• How others see us
• How we perceive others as seeing us

In brand marketing, the more we see ourselves truly as others see us, the more integrated is our brand, and the more consistently we will deliver our proposition.

Of course, this could be a good or bad thing. If our personal brand is consistently unattractive, or out of keeping with the opportunities we wish to grasp, we are in trouble. However, people who have integrity – who are as they appear – are usually highly attractive to certain people (and highly unattractive to others).

This is an issue of segmentation: what is our brand, to whom is it attractive medium/long-term, and is that sufficient for us?

If the answer is no, then we need to change our brand so as to be more attractive to the people we need to impress, and we have to change it in every detail. In other words, to be persuasive, we need to become the people we need to be.

This is as true of corporate branding as of personal branding.

1. Free demo – the free demo of our personal branding tools is a self-assessment using George Herbert Mead’s “I/Me” concept. To try it, click here.
2. When you have found the I/Me self-assessment insightful, we have a suite of three further self-assessments, based on the work of key psychologists, priced at £49.99 for all three (inclusive of all taxes). You can also invite up to 10 friends/colleagues to participate. To access these, please contact us at enquiries@mudvalley.co.uk

For your money you will get:

• immediate access to the answers you have given during your self-assessments the ability to invite up to 10 others to assess “your brand”, using any or all of the four self-assessments
• the ability to print out or save all responses to disk so that you can consider them carefully and discuss them with others

The three additional self-assessments are:

• Role play (Irvine Goffman) – as human beings, we are socially adaptive and therefore tend to behave differently under different circumstances. This may be by choice (e.g. our own desire to impress), or through competitive pressure. In personal life, as in business, if someone is already performing credibly the role we would wish for ourselves, we have to ask ourselves whether there is room for two people to play the same role, whether we can perform the role more credibly (given that the other person is already in full swing), or whether we should seek a spare role. Sometimes other people force us into specific roles not of our choosing – “the entrepreneur”, “the one not to be trusted”, “the creep”, “the philosopher” – through a process called “alter-casting”. This self-assessment is designed to help you explore the different roles you adopt, and whether they are different aspects of the same brand, or different brands. This is an issue business brands always face when expanding internationally across cultural frontiers
• Laddering (George Kelly) – the psychological theory most used by research agencies in brand development is George Kelly’s Personal Construct Theory. Kelly believed they we actively construct our perception of the world around us in a hierarchical network of concepts. These constructs are “bi-polar”, which is to say that they can be measured on a continuum between two contrasting thoughts (e.g. rich vs. poor; happy vs. sad; hope vs. despair). Some of these constructs are “core” to our whole being – we rarely discuss them with others, we protect them to the death, and they motivate our every step. Others are “peripheral” – we are willing to talk about them because they are disposable or temporary (as Groucho Marx said “These are my principles – and, if you don’t like them, I have others!”). Kelly’s theory is that our peripheral constructs are linked to and reflect our core constructs and, by starting with the constructs we are willing to discuss, we can “ladder up” to those which are hidden (maybe even from us) but that represent our deepest motivations. Do this exercise to understand what motivates you.
• Attribution theory (H. Kelley and others) – people quickly create stories about us according to the “cues” we give out (how we talk, how we dress etc.). It is said that in job interviews, interviewers form an indelible impression of us within the first 20 seconds. So what impressions do you give, and are they consistent with the brand you wish to portray? This self-assessment helps you examine your “cues”, and therefore allows you to consider whether you should modify some of them to deliver your brand more effectively

Next steps

1. Free demo – the free demo of our personal branding tools is a self-assessment using George Herbert Mead’s “I/Me” concept. To try it, click here.
2. When you have found the I/Me self-assessment insightful, we have a suite of three further self-assessments, based on the work of key psychologists, priced at £49.99 for all three (inclusive of all taxes). You can also invite up to 10 friends/colleagues to participate. To access these, please contact us at enquiries@mudvalley.co.uk

Important limitation: the Interactive Dialogues technology is not optimised for use with Apple Mac or Netscape browsers.