A manager, newly hired, needs to begin delivering value immediately. This includes learning the job, develop-ing skills, and honing abilities within the corporate

culture as jobs are assigned and completed. A creative manager will also figure out how to distinguish him- or herself in the company and what it takes to create a distinctive role within the corporate structure by creating a message and a strategy to promote a personal brand. Dubbed the personal branding guru by Entrepreneur magazine, William Arruda is a pioneer in personal branding.

Bernadette Martin met Arruda in Paris, France, when he was just starting his company, Reach Communications—now the global leader in personal branding. He created a pioneering program to certify coaches and career professionals in the Reach personal branding methodology. Reach Certified Personal Brand Strategists now span the globe. Arruda has worked with many Fortune 500 brands for more than 15 years, and his com-pany offers a variety of personal branding tools for individuals, corporations, and executives.

Martin interviewed Arruda in Europe recently about some of the key concepts found in his book, Career Distinction: Stand Out by Building Your Brand.

Martin: What is personal branding? How does personal brand-ing relate to the future of the workplace and work changes?

Arruda: Personal branding is permission to be your-self—your best self. It’s knowing what’s authentic to you, differentiating from your peers and relevant and compel-ling to your target audience, and using that to reach your goals and add value to your employer. It separates you from your peers and allows you to expand your personal success while building greater success for your organi-zation. In today’s fast-changing economy and shifting workplace environments, personal branding is no longer a luxury; it has become a critical survival skill.

Martin: Is this something that only works in the consumer-focused culture of the United States?

Arruda: When I first started my personal branding company, Reach, I was living in Paris and would try to sell the concept to companies in Europe with little success. I would always hear “Oh that’s so American.” But just as with most innovations that come from the U.S., the rest of the world figures out how to make it work in their cul-ture. Now, we have certified over 300 people in the Reach

417

An Interview With William Arruda: Communicating Your Personal Brand

Correspondence to: Bernadette Martin, Career Transition Brand Strategist, Founder—Visibility Branding, LLC, 33 (0) 6 33 41 70 01 (phone), email: bmartin@ visibilitybranding.com, site: www.visibilitybranding.com.

inTerView

By

Bernadette Martin

Published online in wiley interScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. • DOI: 10.1002/tie.20280

personal branding methodology who are located in 24 countries on five continents.

Martin: How would personal branding apply/adapt in collectiv-ist cultural contexts, in non-Western cultures?

Arruda: Although it sounds self-serving, personal branding is not always about you. It’s about how you de-liver value to those around you. You can be much more successful in supporting others when you know and apply what makes you exceptional. With Asian cultures, for ex-ample, we focus more on the first phase of the personal branding process—understanding your unique promise of value. Then we discuss how you can apply your great-est strengths and values to your team or organization. We focus less on increasing personal visibility and more on adding value to those around you. We have even modi-fied our personal branding assessment, 360Reach, to include attributes like “humble” and “modest,” so that it is relevant to Asian cultures.

Martin: Brands are not created, they are unearthed. What do you mean by that? What is the process for unearthing a personal brand?

Arruda: The biggest misconception about brands is that they are made up. Effective branding is based in authenticity—what’s true, genuine, and real. Volvo’s brand is all about safety because they build safe cars. So to understand your brand, you need to be introspective and at the same time understand what others think about you. You must build your brand around what makes you exceptional—your superpowers. In the Extract phase of the personal branding process, you learn a lot about who you are, what you want, what drives you, and what others think makes you great.

Martin: How can managers understand more about their current reputation in the marketplace?

Arruda: Your brand—although all about what makes you you—is held in the hearts and minds of those around you, so you need to open yourself up to external feedback. Another term for personal brand is reputation. What can people expect from you? We developed a free assessment, called 360Reach, to help people understand their brands from the outside in and compare self-perceptions with the consolidation of external feedback. It provides them with a portrait for your professional reputation. Strong brands regularly ask for feedback. So you must listen for words people use to describe you and proactively ask for feedback from employees, peers, managers, networking contacts, and other colleagues.

418 interview

thunderbird international Business review Vol. 51, No. 5 September/October 2009

Martin: How does personal branding influence an international manager’s career path?

Arruda: It works the same regardless of your role or objectives. It provides clarity and helps you make the most of everything you do. After going through the process, you don’t run meetings anymore, you run branded meet-ings (meetings with your signature). As an international manager, you already have brand differentiation from managers who don’t have international experience. You need to ask yourself, what makes your international ex-perience different and valuable? How does it give you an edge and how can you use that edge to be more valuable to your employer?

Martin: What might be some risks or downsides to watch for when building a personal brand within an organization?

Arruda: You can’t build a strong brand and please all of the people all of the time. Strong brands often repel some people. Look at the world’s strongest brands—Richard Branson, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Oprah (to a lesser extent internationally). Although they are all successful, not everyone connects with or agrees with them. But most people respect them for what they have accomplished. To stand out, you need to be willing to take a stand, and that means opening yourself up to criticism from the outside world.

Martin: You recommend that each of us build a media plan every year—just as big companies do. Why? How could such a plan be adapted within a large organizational or corporate context?

Arruda: Your value to your employer is not derived exclusively from what you do inside the company. Espe-cially as you move to more senior positions, your external visibility becomes critical to your ability to be successful. You need to be known to—and respected by—your peers. No longer do companies work in a vacuum. To get your job done, you need to source employees, establish part-nerships, learn from peers, and be on top of what is hap-pening in your industry or functional area. That means being a visible and active member of your professional community. When there is an opening on your team, you want to have a line of qualified candidates available to fill that role. Writing articles, delivering presentations, volunteering, and other activities that get you in front of your peers are critical to your success and your ability to do your job. You also add value for your company. When you’re attending an event at an international association, you are representing your company. What you do has value for you and your employer. Today, companies “get” this.

An interview with william Arruda: Communicating Your Personal Brand 419

DOI: 10.1002/tie thunderbird international Business review Vol. 51, No. 5 September/October 2009

spire, and get the best from their employees. When each employee can deliver on the corporate brand promise in a way that is authentic to them, you raise the company to a whole new level and bolster the corporate brand with every action each employee takes. When I work with my clients, we build a custom module for their corporate brand that gets employees thinking about how to apply what they learned about themselves to deliver more con-sistently on the corporate brand promise.

Martin: What are some strategies for linking a personal brand to a corporate/organizational brand?

Arruda: First, you need to understand your brand—what are your greatest strengths, passions, value, and what motivates you. Then, you need to put it in context. How can you use what makes you successful to add value to the organization’s brand? This means companies need to be clear about their brand promise and be willing to get every employee involved in delivering on that promise—not just the marketing department.

Martin: What resources are available for those who want to learn more about building their personal brands?

Arruda: Of course, my publisher would be upset if I didn’t mention my book, Career Distinction: Stand Out by Building Your Brand. There are also lots of free resources at www.reachpersonalbranding.com and www.theperson-albrandingblog.com, as well as on the Web in general.

Martin: Talk a bit about the Three Cs of a strong personal brand. Can you give examples of some strong personal brands that most of us should know, and link them to the Three Cs?

Arruda: The three Cs are clarity, consistency, and constancy. People know what they can expect from strong brands. The brands do not disappoint. You must be clear about who you are and who you are not, you must always deliver the same value, and you must be constantly visible to the people who need to know about you so you can reach your goals. Richard Branson’s brand is all about risk and adventure. He signed the Sex Pistols onto his record label when no one else would touch them. His new project is to take people into outer space. This is all on brand for Branson, who is not your typical CEO. He uses his value of risk and passion for adventure to drive his decisions. The three Cs are important in all cultures. The only difference for more collectivist cultures is with constancy. Instead of constantly being visible by standing out individually, you need to make contributions to your team/organization and work to demonstrate the value you drive together.

Martin: Doesn’t personal branding conflict with the goal of com-panies to build one powerful corporate brand?

Arruda: Actually, no. When you know what makes you great and make a plan to use that to drive value for your team and company, you become the must-have employee. Most of my clients are companies who want to engage, in-

Bernadette Martin is a Career Transition Brand Strategist and Founder of Visibility Branding, LLC. She is a reach Certified Brand Strategist—the first in France—as well as an Online Identity Strategist and 360Reach Assessment Analyst. She also delivers/facilitates the 360Reach certification and produces webinars and podcasts on career development. Martin has interviewed numerous experts on topics related to career transition, brand storytelling, entrepreneurship, new social media, 2.0/3.0 technology, personal branding, and more. Her company offers career transition services for professionals, entrepreneurs, academic institutions, corporations, and associations.

Martin is multilingual and has lived in Taipei, London, and Seattle. She has been based in Paris since 2002, but works with clients (many of whom are T-Birds) from many nationalities around the globe. Martin received a bach-elor of arts in foreign languages from Cal State–northridge and an MBA from the Thunderbird School of Global Management. She is also president of the France Thunderbird Alumni Association, vice president of the American University Clubs of France, and an active member of the european Professional women’s network. Bernadette can be contacted at bmartin@visibilitybranding.com and her site is www.visibilitybranding.com.