Authenticity and passion are imperative. No matter how much you may want to be associated with a particular value, if it is not well supported by your competencies, your audience will not accept it. It is important to remain honest with yourself. This does not mean that you cannot focus on or work to develop skills that support your desired brand. Simply start with a solid basis for your true value. Passion is related to your reflection on the world around you and any opinions you may have. The greatest brands are associated with missions to solve an important problem, and work best when the problem is being solved by a true desire and ability.
Just having particular assets and skills are not enough; you need to be known for your value. You do this by building your brand. Through building a clear plan and direction, you are able to stay consistent in how you communicate about yourself and ensure that you reach the people that matter to you. Consistency over time and media are key to building one's brand, so having a plan or direction is important.
The purpose of this chapter is to describe how to create a plan for your brand. It will uniquely describe the process specific to physicians and researchers and offer solutions to common questions that make building a personal brand so challenging for many individuals.
15.3 Your Brand Plan: Defining Your Positioning
The process of creating a brand plan and strategy involves organizing your ideas and making decisions about your career directions that you can consistently implement over time. Your strategy and brand plan will evolve, especially as you gain a better understanding of your audience and your niche, or position, among similar services or peers. It may be helpful to write down your plan and revisit it every year to see how you are doing and whether any changes need to be made. In general, your brand plan will involve determining your positioning with respect to your target audience(s), creating brand elements, and strategizing how you will support this plan through activities and communication, also called tactics (Figure 15.1).
Figure 15.1 Personal branding process.
Positioning is how you will use your identity and attributes to stand out and build your brand. It refers to the niche you fill and it is specific to an audience or set of audiences. Many online or print resources describe exercises for writing a brand positioning, but you do not need to follow any formal or standardized formats. In fact, trying to write a positioning statement can detract from the more important process of strategizing. A positioning statement merely needs to describe your goals with respect to a target audience and how you uniquely qualify to fulfill them (Figure 15.2).
Figure 15.2 Elements of a positioning.
For many individuals, this is the most difficult part of the branding process to work through. Most personal branding resources begin with self‐awareness exercises, such as identifying key attributes that best reflect who you are from a list of characteristics. The lists may often seem too generic and lack nuance to individuals who are further along in their professional careers. This may be a result of career services professionals authoring most of these resources and because it is traditional to use these tools with someone who is very young and seeking a career. The traditional branding process at an advertisement agency also begins with an assessment of the product attributes. It makes sense to start with learning about a new product if you are a creative director given a new assignment. As a physician/researcher who is already in a career track, you likely already have a good idea about your strengths, interests, and abilities. Because the underlying purpose of the exercise is really about choosing which attributes to focus on, it is easier to start with thinking about one of your goals, the important audience, and what problems that audience needs to solve. This will point you to the attributes that the audience will value. So, begin by formulating your goals and describing the target audience that is important to each goal. In our first case, a community pediatrician identifies a need to brand himself and his group practice.
15.3.1 Positioning Examples
15.3.1.1 Case 1: A Community Pediatrician
A community pediatrician has a unique service approach that ensures patients have short waiting room times, can easily reach a staff member by phone, and can quickly get answers to questions. He has four business partners, who are also pediatrics‐focused healthcare professionals. They attend national meetings and meet with each other monthly to stay current with guidelines and new treatments. He is interested in branding himself along with his business. He knows that his audience includes his local community of potential patients as well as his peers, who may make referrals. He has naturally adapted his practice to provide what his key target audiences value most and is ready to begin the positioning and branding exercises.
The most important aspect of personal branding is your positioning, or where you fit in your target audience's mind. This is a process of matching authentic attributes that you possess with a need that is valued by your audience. The ideal place to begin is to think from the other side of the desk, or from the perspective of your target audience. Start by creating goal scenarios that you may already have in mind based on inspiration from mentors or that you develop based on decisions you have already made. Process each scenario by imagining that you are a member of your target audience who is tasked with identifying someone of value for a specific need or problem. In other words, take yourself out of the equation and work through each scenario to identify the key characteristics of value. Force yourself to maintain an anonymous perspective, keep you and your attributes out of the picture at this point.
After completing this exercise, for each scenario, assess yourself for fit within the audience's needs. Be realistic; you want to be able to fulfill the audience's perception of value. It may be that you are capable of the tasks but that you need to work on demonstrating the capability to the audience.
The next step in building your positioning is to consider the “competition.” This can be peers, colleagues, or others who are attempting to fill the same needs with the same audience. How can you uniquely stand out in a way that your target audience truly finds valuable?
After building all of your scenarios, assess each for how it best fits you, or which feels the most authentic or important to you. You may see how you already fill those needs or how you may strive to add skills or attributes that meet the target audience needs. It may be tempting to decide on what your audience should want or need, but it is often easier to address a need that is already appreciated than to try to reeducate your audience on new concepts. Most importantly, the ideal positioning (and your brand) will be based on what is authentic and consistent with who you are and what your interests and skills are. The following case highlights a community surgeon who works hard to set himself apart from potential competitors. By studying what matters most to his audience, he is able to more easily home in on the way to communicate his value in terms they will relate to.
15.3.1.2 Case 2: A Community Surgeon
A surgeon who has been known to his mentors as an adept, meticulous, and medically knowledgeable physician wants to establish a successful community practice. He specializes in neck surgery and continues to follow advancements in underlying clinical conditions. He sees his audience as local specialists and perhaps primary care physicians. Through networking with potential target audience