A brand is a “Name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller’s good or service as distinct from those of other sellers”. The term “Branding” began simply as a way to tell one person’s cattle from another by means of a hot iron stamp, but today is a way of your product and service competing against a direct competitor.
With so many products and services on the market, companies have been scrambling to package themselves in many different ways that majority of the public will purchase or follow. Millions of dollars have been spent from car companies to pharmaceuticals on focus groups just to figure out the right shade of blue or the right tagline for a brand.
Today the tables have been turned. Rather then creating a new product or convincing a skeptical audience that they “need” a product, the process of “branding” has turned its focus on your life, specifically branding your life and in turn selling it back to you. A perfect example is for that too, you guessed it THEBUMP.com. Even with the current decline of marriage in the USA, people living together and people having babies will always be a growing market.
Another technique of branding your life is customization. You can customize your adidas sneakers to your Ralph Lauren polo insignia shirts. With the press of a few buttons, a product “customized” by you can be shipped to your door steps for a few dollars more then the regular stock in the warehouse product. What more can you ask in life then your very own custom products that no one else “might” have, unless they picked the same custom variables you did.
And the most recent way of branding your life has turned into “personal branding”, communicating the value others will experience by hiring/knowing/working with you. Now its not about the best product for the market or the product that can be best customized by the consumer, its now about you the individual as a brand. Thanks to the rise of social media, personal branding is a new level of branding your life but not by a company but by you. When getting hired, social networks like Facebook and Linkedin have become part of the hiring process. Here you can “package” yourself with referrals, recommendations, photos etc just like a brand from a company.
Which ever way your life gets branded, either by you or a site remember 1st impressions do count, be it your life as the “brand” selling yourself on LinkedIn or Company “X” selling your life to you.