Be Your Own Brand - A Breakthrough Formula for Standing Out From The Crowd

David McNally, Karl D Speak

Berrett-Koehler Publishers (September 2003)

Synopsis 
Be Your Own Brand is useful as both a personal and an organizational development tool. As a personal resource, Be Your Own Brand provides individuals with a powerful way to focus their thoughts and behaviors on creating important, distinctive relationships in every aspect of their professional and personal lives. As a business resource, it simultaneously helps employees better understand their organization's brand strategy and more effectively align their own actions with it.

Reviews

Self help for marketers- one useful idea
This book re-casts in marketing speak Adam Smith's old injunction for businessmen, that they ought to be honorable, because dishonorable behavior will damage their reputation, and thereby damage their business. Of course, those who have not noticed that other people judge them by their behavior, are probably so far gone that this book wouldn't help them anyway.

That said, thinking of oneself as a commodity, like toothpaste or hamburgers, can be a useful heuristic device for understanding the perceptions other people make about you, and where their understanding might not align with your own. It is, as the authors point out, not enough to simply be a good person. If other people do not "perceive" you as a good person, then you're unlikely to get many of the benefits of being a good person. The authors' most interesting peice of advice is to use metrics to measure how well your behavior matches your "brand" (the kind of person you want to be) and to also actively measure how well your "brand" accords with others' perceptions of you.

This is a rather starkly utilitarian perspective on self-development. This book contains several ideas in the details that are useful thought-experiments for understanding where there may be a disconnect between what you think you are, and what other people think you are.

Daves review
"I approached this book with great skepticism. Seeing myself as a brand was not appealing but the truth is we are all 'branded' in the eyes of others. What struck me immediately was the observation that people cannot see inside of me, they judge me by my actions. In the end I found the ideas in this book to be intriguing and compelling"