Building your personal brand is about identifying and communicating your points of difference.  Harvard Business School Professor Jill Avery joins Andrea to talk about why personal branding is so important and why many people hesitate or reject this whole premise of personal branding.

TAKE THE PERSONAL BRAND SELF-ASSESSMENT

• https://www.talkabouttalk.com/personalbrand

RESOURCES

• “A New Approach to Building Your Personal Brand” by Jill Avery and Rachel Greenwald HBR article: https://hbr.org/2023/05/a-new-approach-to-building-your-personal-brand


• “The Brand Called You” by Tom Peters FastCompany article – https://www.fastcompany.com/28905/brand-called-you


• Jill’s recommendation: “Breaking Glass: Tales from the Witch of Wall Street by Patricia Walsh Chadwick – https://amzn.to/3yWBxWL

CONNECT WITH ANDREA & TALK ABOUT TALK

• Website: TalkAboutTalk.com


• Communication Coaching Newsletter:  https://talkabouttalk.com/newsletter


• LinkedIn Andrea: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreawojnicki/


• LinkedIn TalkAboutTalk: https://www.linkedin.com/company/talkabouttalk/


• Youtube Channel: @talkabouttalkyoutube

TRANSCRIPT

Particularly in today’s world. Avoiding personal branding is just really not an option.

And I’m not sure it ever has been. You know, people point to the rise of social media as building up the hype of personal branding. But we’ve always had a need for personal branding. We’ve always had a need to communicate the value that we bring to the world. So our medium is different in the way that we communicate it. We use, you know, online and and social media and other digital technologies to help us. But we’ve always done this work. And there’s always been a need for this work.

That was Jill Avery, marketing professor at Harvard Business School and personal branding expert. Last year Jill co-authored a paper in Harvard Business Review called “A New Approach to Building Your Personal Brand.”

Jill is not only a personal branding expert, she’s also a friend and a wonderful human. I can’t wait for you to her what she has to say share with us about personal branding. Let’s do this!

Welcome to Talk about Talk podcast episode #171 “Building Your Personal Brand with Harvard Business School Professor Jill Avery”. In this episode, you’re going to learn why personal branding is so important – mandatory really, and also a few reasons why many people hesitate or even reject this whole premise of personal branding.

In case we haven’t met, my name is Dr. Andrea Wojnicki please just call me Andrea. I’m your executive communication coach. I coach executives like you to improve your communication skills so you can communicate with confidence and achieve your career goals. To learn more about me and what I do, check out my website, talkabouttalk.com where you can read about the coaching and workshops that I run. Plus there are a bunch of free resources for you there.

Ok, let’s get into this. I’m sure you want to hear from Jill. Here’s how this episode is going to go. After I introduce Jill, we’ll get right into the interview. Then at the end I’m going to summarize with the three learnings that I want to reinforce based on our conversation.

I met Jill over 20 yrs ago, when I was in my first year of the doctorate program at HBS. She was considering joining to program. We met and instantly hit it off. We quickly learned that we had similar backgrounds – we both worked in Consumer Packaged Goods (or CPG) marketing, she at Gilette and me at Kraft. We also both earned our MBAs, but we loved school and we both ultimately earned our doctorate.

Today, Jill Avery serves as a Senior Lecturer of Business Administration and C. Roland Christensen Distinguished Management Educator in the marketing unit at Harvard Business School. She’s a prolific and award-winning author of 100+ publications on branding, CRM (that’s cust relationship mktg), and digital marketing.

In addition to her role as a faculty member at HBS, Jill remains close to practice by serving as a board member, consultant, educator, and advisor to companies and their executives.

She is a passionate and enthusiastic award-winning teacher and a creative and innovative course designer, currently teaching two courses, Marketing and Creating Brand Value.

She also leads a new Harvard Business School Executive Education program on

Creating Brand Value designed for senior executives and two Harvard Business School Online courses: one on Creating Brand Value and the other on Personal Branding.

Yep, she’s qualified!

Here we go!

INTERVIEW

Thank you so much, Jill, for being here today to talk with us about personal branding.

Jill: I’m thrilled to be here, Andrea. Thank you so much for having me, and it’s delightful to be working with you again.

Okay, let’s get right into this. My 1st question for you is with regards to the benefits of developing your personal brand you mentioned to me when we met that it seems to be a hot topic. It’s in demand with your Mba students and your Exec Ed students. why do you think that is what are the benefits of developing your brand.

Jill: I think there’s so many benefits for developing and managing your personal brand over time. And I I think this is why people ar