Your Personal Brand

Emily Kucukalic (koo-choo-kar-litch) is the Managing Director of the Brand New You Group, which she founded in 2009.  Brand New You delivers personal branding programs to the world’s leading companies and counts more than 35% of the ASX50 as its clients.

In 2017, Brand New You won an Australian Marketing Institute Award for Excellence for a program that they delivered with the Westpac Group. BNY’s program formed a key part of Johnson & Johnson’s leadership program that won the Australian HR Award for Best Leadership Development Program in 2015.  They have received an NPS of +97 from the Westpac Group.

For more than a decade, Emily has built a reputation as an entertaining and insightful speaker on personal branding, building personal presence and business development. An inspiring presenter, Emily’s fundamental belief is that people buy from people, not organisations.  And that people work for people, not organisations.

Prior to founding Brand New You, Emily was the Group Head of Brand and External Relations at AGL Energy and a member of the Executive Team.  Before joining AGL, she was the Director of Marketing and Communications for EDS across Asia Pacific including Japan, China and India. 

Emily is an EY Entrepreneurship Prize winner, was a finalist in the Telstra Young Businesswoman awards and a winner of the Lucent Technologies Leadership awards three years in a row. She was a founding Director of Conversely, a not for profit organisation focused on engaging non-working women in Australia.

Your Personal Brand

Your personal brand is the impression you leave on people.  It is thinking about how you look, act, and most importantly, how you make other people feel.  How will others react to you? 

Having impact means ensuring that others recognise what you stand for – what you value and what your strengths are.  Think of your personal brand as all this packaged up together.  Your reputation is built from your brand, your brand relies upon your reputation.  They exist in a symbiotic relationship of growth.

The three key words that drive us in developing a personal brand are:

1. Deliberate – making a clear choice to share who you are, what your strengths are and what you value with others. There are many levers that you have to do this – how you move, how you speak, your costume, the way you walk, your physical presence and, of course, what it is you have to say.
2. Distinctive – this is about being authentic and not ‘fake it ‘til you make it’. If you keep focused on your strengths, your unique perspective, your values – you will inherently stand out from others.
3. Coherence – we can only trust what we understand. Humans are driven to make sense of others and this enables us to move forwards and create a relationship and interaction with each other.  Making your brand easy to understand makes it easier for others to relate to you. This has another unexpected effect.  If you are easy to understand, then people who do not necessarily value what you stand for will move away. This is a good thing.

To have a brand, you must stand for something.  If you stand for something, not everyone will agree.

How do you start to build your personal brand?

We approach the development of a personal brand by thinking about what makes you, you.  From a psychological perspective, we work with the five theories of self.

We use this theory to understand how to share with others what we are capable of.  With this theory, there are five parts to you.

1. Authentic self. You might call it your soul.  It is the you that only you know.  You share parts of yourself with your family, your friends or at work, but there is this whole you that you cannot, nor should not want to change.
2. Historical or cultural self. These are the reasons for you.  Where you come from, where your parents came from, where you lived, went to school, where you worked before now.  All the things that brought you to where you are right now.  The important thing to know about the historical self is that people will start to apply biases to the historical you – “she went to that school, she must be x” or “he worked with that team, I heard you had to be really tough.”

Biases can be positive or negative.  They basically assume that if something has happened before, it will happen again.  Understanding what biases may exist helps you to navigate them.  If you know, you can live up to expectations or exploit expectations – the important thing is that you get to choose. 

3. Extended self. This is where you start to take control.  This is where personal branding really starts to matter.  The theory goes that if you place things on you then you start to tell a story about yourself.  The story you tell creates your…
4. Projected self. The outcome of the first three selves.  It is the result of what you choose to show the world about you.
5. Ideal self. This is the you that you want to be.  Your ‘ultimate me’ goal. 

The extended self is really interesting.  It looks at all the things you place ‘on’ the central self (authentic and historical) to tell your story.  The extended self is vast and includes everything from what you wear, to where you live, your family, your partner, your pets, the sport you play, the places you enjoy, your hobbies, your team, your students and your school.  Some of these you value more, you perceive them as more a part of you.

The psychological term for this is to cathect something to you.  Cathecting is about investing emotion into something and in doing so, having a sense of ownership over it.  As an education professional, there is a high chance that you have cathected the school that you work at and the students you work with.  Some of you may have even cathected some parents – though in these demanding days of tiger parents, this is a significantly less attractive proposition!

When you cathect something, it has a deep meaning about who you are and how you project yourself.  It becomes part of your personal brand.  This is why it is so hard to decide to leave where you work, and why some of you never will.  Because, it is part of your brand.

Emily Kucukalic

Founder and Managing Director | Brand New You