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.