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Personal Branding in the College Admission Process
Posted by Shannon Meairs on Thursday, November 5, 2009 at 4:27 PM (PST)
In my last blog article, I introduced the concept of a "brand" in your college application. The concept of branding is nothing new, but most students don't have an underlying understanding of how to brand themselves. Before you're able to learn how to brand yourself, it's important we take a deeper look at branding and why it is absolutely essential to discover your unique brand, before you start your application.
What is Branding?
We all know what branding is conceptually. We can name hundreds of brands off the top of our heads and we know exactly what that thing, person, company is all about with one word. Starbucks, Nike, Whole Foods, Disney, Tony Robbins, Suze Orman, Madonna, you get the point. When you think of Starbucks, what do you think? Books? No, you think coffee, yes, they have books, mugs, coffee makers, cd’s, etc but those are revenue streams, not a “brand”. When you think “books” most people think Amazon or Barnes and Noble, though Amazon and B&N both sell dvd’s, music, gifts, trinkets and other crap…but their “branding” is “books”.
What does this have to do with the college admission?
Everything. An applicant has about 2 minutes to convince an Admission Counselor that they are a perfect fit at X University. Not. A lot. Of. Time. Could you do it? If you had 2 minutes to convince someone who held your future in their hands, would you be able to do it? Most people can’t because they don’t understand the 8 simple truths of branding. Which are:
- If you have a solid brand, people can easily identify what you’re worth: The problem is that most people don’t know how to showcase themselves to look like rockstars.
- Avoid the Personal Branding Kiss of Death: You are involved in so many things, no one can figure you out and you haven’t articulated it well.
- Intentional Self-Discovery: Discovering your brand doesn’t happen by accident, it’s a calculated process revealing who you are, what’s important to you and where you want to go
- Passion Integration: The art of aligning your talents, passions, achievements and professional goals into one cohesive brand.
- What were you born to do? We were all born with a genetic predisposition to be great at certain things, what are yours?
- Patterns and Archetypes: We are creatures of habit and tend to behave and act in patterns throughout our lives.
- Narrative: Our brains are wired to think in terms of narratives and storytelling. Storytelling is a universal human trait. Learn how to do it for yourself.
- The Purple Cow (borrowed from Seth Godin): Boring stuff is easily forgotten. Something remarkable is worth talking about. If you saw a purple cow on the side of the road, you would remember it. And probably talk about it. Be the purple cow in the admission process.
There you have it...Personal Branding 101. We'll go deeper into personal branding and how to really figure it out for yourself in the next few blogs....so stay tuned!
Shannon
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