How Personal Branding Boosts Brand Value & Influence in the Market:

You are what your brand is in the market. There is no inspirational and empowering way of wrapping 2023 as a notable year in the digital marketing landscape without reflecting on the role of personal branding in brand building concerning the Open AI leadership fiasco that left most of its ChatGPT users and supporters in disarray of what was under discussion on its leadership round table meetings. 

The AI chatbot pioneer and its infamous intervention in content creation sent all tongues wagging about its future under questionable leadership that shocked and shook the tech world, with the Open AI CEO Sam Altman coming out as a protagonist in the upheaval at the company.

 Why This Story?

This story will help you understand how leadership qualities influence brand presence, positioning, and influence in the digital ecosystem. Just like in literature, where there is characterization, in business, there is branding. That is personal and business branding. In literature, there are protagonists, either as a hero in the story. In brand building, there is a personal brand and a business brand. 

So, to keep you salivating over this personal branding story, let's dive deep into the branding aspects that will help you in your brand-building journey as an entrepreneur, creator, or startup CEO. Before we dig into the gist of the story, let us reflect on the role of personal branding in entrepreneurship.

The Role of Personal Branding in Entrepreneurship

In entrepreneurship, you are what your brand will become. If your personality is manipulative, your brand personality will grow to connive and compromise standards in the marketplace. That is where brand strategy, shaped by core values comes into play based on the personal branding of the leadership in the company or business venture. 

The Open AI's recent leadership saga made us realize how personal branding boosts brand influence in the Market. Am I the only one who felt for Sam Altman and how he seemed logged in the vices of his branding and that of his board members and other colleagues around the leadership fiasco he found himself in?

That made him appear confused about who to trust and not trust with his role, position, and influence as a CEO at a pioneer AI tech company backed by another well-established tech empire, Microsoft. Why did he seem to be whining to and from between the involved tech tycoons, including Elon Musk, intervening at one spot in the story.? It all boils down to personal branding that helps to build confidence and charisma. 

In the present digital economy, being a strategic thinker with charismatic power to communicate and articulate creative and innovative perspectives in your company demonstrates a strong personal brand that can influence long-term and sustainable strategies as a startup CEO or leader.

What is Personal Branding?

In the digital economy, personal branding is fast evolving into more of an individual brand package of your knowledge, experience, skills, and talent. And how best you can share them as a brand with the world through digital marketing. That way, build awareness of your identity, position, presence, and influence in your industry and niche as an entrepreneur, startup CEO, creator or freelancer in the creative digital economy where personal talent, skills, experience, and knowledge economy seem to be fast taking over the digital economy.

You can check this with publicity platforms like Mind Valley, British Maestro, and Master Class Learning. In the knowledge-based economy, the strength of your brand revolves around your ability, creativity, and innovation to turn your knowledge into information and package it with creativity into an innovative solution of value that solves a problem in your target market.

Personal Branding as a Startup CEO

Personal branding as an entrepreneur or Startup CEO is not just about visibility and appearances on social media platforms. It is about building an intellectual, creative, and innovative business stamina that leaves no stone unturned about your disposition, interaction with your knowledge, industry, and the niche area you are vying for your personal and business brand to dominate and make an impact. Here is how it should be, especially for solid brand building in the digital economy. Before we dig in, let’s reflect again on the Open AI leadership fiasco and its relevance to personal branding.

Open AI and its recent leadership controversy left most ChatGPT enthusiasts and users wondering whether the management of the pioneer chatbot would survive the trauma of its brand identity, presence, and positioning in the AI tech industry, especially with the ChatGPT as a demonstration of Generative AI and Machine Learning breakthroughs in the AI tech industry. 

The chatbot's capabilities of writing more like a human made the whole world drool despite being topical and controversial in content creation for Digital Marketing, specifically in Content Marketing and other marketing strategies that felt all its effects. Whether positive or negative. So, solid brand building requires strong personal branding that leads to a strong brand.

In brief, it is about personal identity before your brand identity. And cultivating a positive and powerful mindset that shapes your brand influence in the market with a strong passion to be of service in the industry and niche you are building your brand, guided by the values that enhance your vision and being visionary in everything the brand you are creating and building is going to be. So, let’s dive deep into how we can end 2023 with a bang by reflecting on how personal branding influences your brand-building efforts as an entrepreneur, creator, or Startup CEO. 

Personal identity

If you don’t know yourself, your values, position, and influence in your industry, you are bound to get swayed by the world from being you and being the best of yourself in what you create and the brand you intend to build in the market. So, personal identity starts with knowing yourself deeply with a comprehensive outline of all aspects of life and their impact on your brand. 

If you want to know how to do it, we have you covered with our personal branding tool. You can get it here as preparation for 2024 to start with a bang of knowing who you are and what you need out of life and business, especially as an entrepreneur in the creative digital economy that revolves around talent, skills, and knowledge products and services.

Your identity emerges during childhood. And you know how most of us grow up stifled by beliefs, values, culture, social status, and class. And if you don’t dig deep to understand and describe yourself and your self-identity, you can lose the deep sense of self. However, today’s digital world is no longer about those surface aspects of your identity. But something more meaningful and valuable than your physical, psychological, and philosophical personality identity. So, learn to have a deep sense of yourself for personal branding in your brand-building efforts.

Mindset

Most successful CEOs in the digital entrepreneurial business landscape have strong principled mindsets that are not in most people in the wider world. It is not about being greedy for money. It is about creating and providing value, not with a limited mind of looking at the local market, but globally. Local mindset is okay. But thinking big and globally liberates you and expands your mind to think beyond borders. Business is business all over the world. 

If it is brand building, it has always been reasoning that any business needs branding, no matter where and in what country it is operating. So, mindset is a great asset in your personal development for personal branding in whatever field you are working and offering services. Mindset shapes your thoughts, feelings, and behavior toward your business pursuits. It strengthens your imagination in entrepreneurship. An entrepreneurial mindset is a pacesetter in today’s digital economy. 

Mindset also shapes your outlook and disposition and influences your success and failure in your dreams. It affects how you think, feel, and behave in any given situation. And whether you view the world in an enlightening way for positive results in a realistic way that promotes growth and development to achieve great things through discipline, dedication, and hard work, working smart as in AI tech tools.

Passion

That reminds me of the movie “Passion of Christ”. Passion is about dedication to accomplish a mission and fulfill a vision. It’s about the deep desire to do something wholeheartedly and knowing it is the only noble thing you can do to serve your industry and niche. And knowing it contributes to the world because of its value and benefit to humanity.

What makes you jump out of bed and feel ready for the day without any doubt hovering at the back of your mind about your purpose and value in life and business? That thing is what spells your passion. It makes you feel alive and aware of your identity, position, and influence in life and business. 

Your passion shapes your dreams and goals in life and business. No one can dream of stuff that they are not passionate about. Passion drives endurance. You can think of the passion of Christ that revolutionized the world into making it what God created it to be. If you are Christian, you can easily understand what I mean. 

What you are passionate about and willing to demonstrate in the world above any criticism is what shapes your brand and its influence in the world. You can reflect on the leadership saga that left Open AI as a chatbot pioneer shaken with its brand positioning, identity, reputation, and value in the tech industry so questionable that its brand equity nearly shattered in the market.

Values 

Values are what shape your purpose and value in the market. Without values, you can easily get caught up in dirty deals that do not promote humanity and create a better world for future generations. A person of principles is what the world is yearning for and craving in a business world that has become a battlefield for egoism and greed for monopoly and dominance, especially in the tech industry.

You might be a tech giant, but the reason you are pursuing your projects should reflect the values you uphold for your branding and the brand you are building for everyone concerned around you. Are your brand values going to guide future generations to maintain that brand with ease and pride in its principles in creating a better world to live, learn, work, and do business for everyone concerned? 

Integrity and quality control are good ingredients for personal branding that will promote trust and credibility with all people you interact with in your business pursuits. In a business landscape where chatbots and robots can overtake human capabilities and responsibilities, people need close human-to-human communication.

 As an individual, you must have your own set of values that build your branding. And help you build a solid brand of strong values. The most common and widely acknowledged value that can help shape your brand to maintain a sold identity of self is integrity. That is being more human with human qualities and principles that can strengthen your connection with customers and stakeholders for personal branding in brand building.

Visionary

Being visionary is thinking big and imagining possibilities that some people can hardly see around them. Though the way the dictionary defines it is sometimes confusing, where there is no vision, people perish. Your vision shapes your branding. You can imagine being a CEO who is always empty-headed and malnourished in being a visionary. Being visionary is not hallucinatory. 

It is imagining the reality of possibilities with the creative and innovative power to turn your vision into reality. That will make your brand not just a name but ideas to implement and intellectual properties to pass on to future generations. A visionary has original ideas about how they view the world with a futuristic mindset. Personal branding helps to boost a growth mindset shaped by your powerful imagination and creativity. 

You are capable of imagining future possibilities in your industry and niche market. You have the wisdom to think massive. And have a strong vision of how to do it and are willing to do it your way. And that shapes your brand in a transformative way that empowers you to contribute to bringing and making a change in the world. That way, it boosts your brand-building efforts.