This past weekend, I had a chance to sit down with some friends, the biggest bowl of popcorn commercially available, and a pretty terrific movie, The Outlaw Josey Wales. If you haven’t seen it, the basic gist of it is that it’s a Clint Eastwood western from back in the day before he was directing. As we watched Clint kick all sorts of butt in the Old West, we all found ourselves letting out one definitive statement during various parts of the movie: “What a badass.”
After the movie ended and we all reflected on our shared viewing experience (before getting snack refills and popping in Rio Bravo), I realized something: Clint’s badassery wasn’t just a role, nor was it just his attitude.
It was his brand.
Although many people consider the term “personal branding” to refer to establishing one’s own online reputation through a website, blog, social networks and so on, it refers to a grand tradition centuries older than the Internet.
It’s likely that the concept of the personal brand came about when Og the caveman was able to convince Ug, Thak and all of the other Cro-Magnons that he should become leader of their tribe (which had never before had a leader), and was given the position. He had found a way to establish himself as a leader, and kept that position and brand until he was trampled by a wooly mammoth.
Personal branding has gone beyond leadership and government to include writers, artists, military personnel, and almost any famous person in all of history. In fact, one of the best examples of personal branding at its best and worst is the celebrity.
Going back to Clint Eastwood for a minute, one can find a clear delineation between the roles he chose and the image (and subsequent success) that he cultivated from them. Eastwood, like Western peers John Wayne and Lee Van Cleef, chose roles as a stoic hero (or anti-hero) for almost all of his films. Even in some of his less genre-specific movies (i.e.: Every Which Way But Loose), he kept a consistent stable of attitudes, mannerisms, actions and reactions that branded the characters as his. Clint Eastwood has never been a character actor. Any character that he played would come off as Clint Eastwood’s interpretation of that character
On the other side of the Western Actor Branding Scale, we have thespians like Eli Wallach and Yul Brynner. While these actors varied the roles, character types, film genres and performances that they gave in each movie, giving them a wider audience into some areas that Wayne or Eastwood might not reach as well, they did not gain as much recognition or acclaim. Because they let the characters overshadow their own personalities, giving iconic performances as people other than themselves.
When developing your personal brand, a key factor to success is consistency. If your actions don’t match your words, your resume doesn’t match your experiences or the Google results for your name don’t match your industry, you have a big brand management problem.
If you take the character actor’s method, you might have a more diverse array of skills and competencies, but you will have a diluted personal brand that will not help you establish yourself in your chosen field. Instead, you need to commit yourself to Eastwood’s method and stay on-point with your messages. It’s not something that you can pause or turn off – everything you do reflects on the brand of You.
You are your brand.
This might sound a little daunting, but it should come as more of a relief. You’ve been building your personal brand for years through your education, work experiences, personality and skills. You already have an intrinsic knowledge of your personal brand and how to best apply it to get what you want. You can add a web presence, but your personal brand’s product, CEO and mascot has been, and will always be, you.
So the next time you’re trying to boost your personal brand to get more attention from prospective employers, get more hits on your blog or make yourself known socially, make sure to stay on point with a consistent message. It worked for Clint Eastwood.
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This post was written for the FortuneCity.com Personal Branding Series on BrazenCareerist. If you haven’t signed up for the site already (even though we talked about this), do it now and check out some awesome career, business and life blogs.
