Brand Templates

The formula for a personal brand

What I did accidentally, you can do intentionally.

A nice formula for a personal brand is Identity + Opinions. A personal brand based solely on who you are doesn’t really communicate what you’re about. A personal brand based solely on what you do is quite… impersonal. People like knowing a bit of both, and you can give it to them in a few short words. Some ideas:

• “I’m a former public school teacher, and I think the way we teach people to code can be greatly improved.”
• “I was an actual architect, and we’re doing software architecture all wrong.”
• “I did my graduate thesis on static analysis, and I see a new generation of tools that make developers faster and less frustrated.”

Don’t limit your imagination

I really want to give you more hints on this, but I’m afraid if I gave more examples, I might limit your imagination. Don’t even take this formula as a given. It’s just one template. Another template is “X for Y”: "<what you do> for <who you do it for>." “I create gorgeous, accessible frontends for DTC e-commerce brands” is a highly marketable oneliner pitch. “I create backends that scale to millions of peak concurrent users for live streaming apps.” And so on. This is a more business-oriented template that puts the target audience/customer squarely in focus.

The point is, being able to pitch yourself (and why people should care) in a short, consistent way is a powerful weapon in your marketing arsenal. You can choose to think about this rather than improvise.

Brand manifestation

Once you know what you’re about and have nailed down your brand, it’s time to plaster it all over. Do you know how Nike pays athletes millions of dollars just to wear stuff with their logo on it? That’s what you’re going to do with everything you touch. Top brand consultants ask: “What are the best ways to connect your values and unique value proposition to your site?” You should do that with your portfolio, blog, Twitter, resume, and work output.

Manifest your brand

You don’t have to stay digital. In fact, in a digital-first world, going physical sticks out. If your product gives people peace of mind, you might fill your office with aromatic candles and hand them out as gifts (This is not hypothetical; this has been done). Shirley Wu is a data visualization consultant; she prints out her data visualizations as her business cards and hands them out at conferences. You BET they return 1000x their marketing expense in memorability and virality.

Be remarkable

Seth Godin (you’re going to hear his name a lot in marketing, think about why) calls this having a Purple Cow. Design Pickle, a design agency, picked a unique name and literally dress up in pickle suits and hand out pickles at conferences, which gets them notoriety and business. To manifest their brand, they lean hard into it and see great success while having a lot of fun because their brand is authentic and consistent all the way through, from their name down to their swag.