You have to develop your personal brand before you communicate it

A reader's comment on a post by Chris Wilson over at The Marketing Fresh Peel blog caught my eye this week, and inspired me to add my own comment.

One of the hardest things in working with clients is that they want to skip straight to communicating their brand. Thinking about your brand is the hardest part. In particular because it often means letting go of things that you’ve allowed to define you in the past, but which may make your brand “fuzzy”. A lot of books on personal branding focus on the communications aspect because that’s the “fun” bit, and you can get a lot of “stuff” done quickly.

Developing a brand is a slow, thoughtful process, and it can be a long time before you see where it’s all going. But it’s like laying down the foundations of a new building: you have to dig deep, and 90% of what you’re laying down won’t be seen by anyone else, but it needs to be there, underpinning what you’ll build on top of it, otherwise it won’t stand up!