Personal Brand
My speculation: personal brands will become a trend in the future.
American management scholar Peters has a widely quoted saying: the survival rule of work in the 21st century is to build a personal brand. He believes that not only enterprises and products need to build brands, but individuals also need to build personal brands. The widespread circulation of this sentence also shows that personal brands have gained people’s attention. In this increasingly competitive era, no matter what kind of organization you’re in, to make people know and accept you, first you must fully demonstrate your abilities. If you bury yourself in work but aren’t recognized, your outstanding performance will be drowned in the flood of information. Therefore, having one’s individual value recognized is more important than anything; to promote personal success and have a harmonious, happy life, everyone needs to build their own distinct “personal brand” like those celebrities, so that everyone truly understands and fully recognizes it — only then can you have a sustainable career.
The 21st century is the brand era. Management scholars point out that you should also build your own brand in the workplace as soon as possible, so as to become a person remembered by bosses and colleagues. When they mention you, they can immediately think of many of your distinctive strengths, such as your professional ability and your approachable personality. In this era of full freedom of choice, if you have your own personal brand in the workplace, you’ll have more choices and more opportunities for upward development.
Everyone is using Weibo and blogs to accumulate fans — actually this is building your own personal brand, but these may be paid, or unsatisfying, or not as functional as you’d wish.
Tencent’s WeChat also put out a slogan “Even the smallest individual has their own brand,” which is quite right — it wants you to build your own brand on its platform. But everyone still mostly uses WeChat for chatting, as a replacement for QQ or its voice/upgraded version.
When I got into websites in high school, the first one I created was a personal homepage. I think when everyone learns web design, the first webpage you make is generally your own homepage, right? Hehe. This is unconsciously developing your own personal brand; people are by nature hopeful to be understood by others and to be noticed.
With the continuous improvement of living standards, people’s consumption spending increases, computers become widespread, and electronics get cheaper. I think websites are no longer out of reach for ordinary people. Today’s post-2000s kids, exposed to computers and electronic devices from a young age, have very strong learning ability, and now there are also excellent open-source projects, such as WordPress, which I really like — you can make your own themes, or download themes if you can’t, with great extensibility. Installing different plugins makes WordPress endlessly variable with different functions. I can now set up a WordPress site within 20 minutes; it’s not hard, and the funds needed aren’t much — about 10 yuan a month on average. Those who can afford a Yellow Diamond might as well start their own independent blog, where every part of the page is up to you — isn’t that better?
Today’s people no longer pursue how good something is, but individuality, customization, uniqueness. Personal customization is actually using your own personal brand.