Your ideal brand shows your target market how your abilities and your passion will help them fulfill their desires. Why both abilities and passion? As business guru Alan Weiss explains, you need all three–market need, competence, and passion. Here’s what can happen if one of them is lacking:

1. Market need, personal skill, but no passion: Let’s say you’re really good at spreadsheets. There’s certainly a demand for spreadsheet-skilled people. But you hate spreadsheets. So branding yourself as an expert in that field may lead you to business you loathe.
2. Personal skill, passion, but no market need: you may love knitting and be a whiz with yarn, but the demand for hand-crafted sweaters has, shall we say, rather shrunk in the past few decades. Branding yourself as a knitting expert might diminish your career opportunities.
3. Market need, passion, but no skill: what if you love driving trucks? There’s certainly a need for truck drivers, but you’d need a certain amount of skill (and a license). This is the easiest of the three imbalances to correct: in many cases, the necessary competence can be acquired (many, but not all– good luck becoming an opera singer if you’re hopelessly tone-deaf).

It is thus your job to define your target market; find out what they want, and match your skills & your interests to their desires. So you first need to ask yourself– what do you really want to do? For those of you who are not quite sure about that one, the best book I ever read on the subject was Finding Your Own North Star, by Martha Beck. Then–what are you good at? And finally– who needs these skills? You also, of course, may want to think about the competition, because to stand out from the pack, you need to know which pack you need to stand out from.

You want your brand to be positively remembered by your target market, and those who can recommend you to it, so make it:

-Simple, and as short as possible whilst delivering your message
-Intriguing and even provocative

Ideally, it would be memorable to the third degree: when you told your brand to someone, they would not only understand it correctly, but be able to repeat it correctly to someone else, who would understand it correctly, and so forth.

As many branding experts will tell you, one of our most common pitfalls is trying to be all things to all people. You just can’t please everyone, and trying to do so is a recipe for failure. Few brands are successful in trying to reach “everybody”; on the other hand, we can all think of brands who, in trying to broaden their appeal, lost their initial customer base (Ford comes to mind with “Not Your Father’s Oldsmobile”). The most successful brands concentrate on pleasing their target market first– and they don’t worry whether people who are not in this category are left indifferent or even annoyed.

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You too have a target market–whomever can have the biggest impact on your life/career/business at the moment. You need to figure out who this market is, and what their deepest dreams/ hopes/ desires are. Then, you create your brand to show them how YOU are the answer to their prayers. You can even go looking for primary, tertiary, and secondary target markets– the secondary are people who can recommend you to the primary; and tertiary would be people who can negatively impact the situation if they get really too ticked off– just make sure to keep your priorities straight. Whenever there’s a needs conflict between your target markets, you should be clear on who your primary people to please are.

You have a brand already—you just may not be aware of it. Branding is what others say when they want to describe you to one another: for instance, if they were to recommend you for a new position, they might say “hire John, because he’s …..” Whatever words and descriptions they have for you is your brand.

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For companies, good branding is why Starbucks can charge double their competitors’ prices for the same coffee—and still have full house. For people, personal branding is what turns some people into superstars, while others plod along in ordinary careers. It’s the driving force in Madonna, Richard Branson, or Bill Gates’ staying power.
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There’s no such thing as a good or bad brand per se, only an effective or ineffective one depending on its goal (to reach your target market). Starbucks and Dunkin’Donuts have completely different target markets, and each is an effective brand with regards to its goal and target market.

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Your brand should be optimized for your personal target market (and yes, you can have more than one.) For instance, you’re going to play up different brand elements for a personal goal (finding the right partner) than for a business goal (finding the right job). You might play up cooking skills for the former and organizational skills for the latter. Confuse them at your peril– you’ll rarely impress a future boss with your domestic abilities.
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