Personal vs Commercial Branding: what is the difference?

Remember that branding is doing everything so that your target audience sees and thinks of your in the right way. Businesses spend a lot of time and money to achieve this through certain colours, tag lines and a specific brand logo and name. Within branding there is several mini branding components if you want to dissect it even further. 

The main similarities between personal and commercial branding is the processes involved in creating a unique name and image for products or persons in the target audience's mind with a consistent theme, tone of voice and images. All these are put in place to establish the significant differences and attract the correct audience and retain loyal customers.

Doing business in the digital era is not the same as before, you need a brand identity for your brand as well as for you. Who are you, what do you do, what are your likes and dislikes. This is why you need a commercial and personal brand.

What is commercial branding?

This is often interchanged with corporate branding (which is often very different). This is the process of having and promoting a brand that is commercially bought and sold at a large scale. For example brands such as Nike, Evian and Topshop.  Commercial branding has been around for years and knowing how to get customers to buy into brands is one of the main functions of marketing.

What is personal branding?

Personal branding has always existed. It is a relationship with you, an individual who exists separately from your company. Hence why you will often hear me say, there's Beyoncé (or Oprah, Serena Williams to name a few) the person and Beyoncé the brand. It is attributes of yourself that you choose to market in order to be closer to your target audience.

This is why you always see celebrities with a publicist and a PR team they propel good news and mitigate bad press all in the hope to keep their client's brand going for the better.  The process of personal branding involves finding the key attributes that people relate to you, build a reputation around as well as the aspects of your industry you want to be known for.

Personal branding also involves managing your reputation, style, look, attitude and skill set the same way that a marketing team would run the brand Topshop. You come in a package and rather than selling a product or service, you are selling ( which in turn can sell products and services).

By recognising, developing and optimising your personal brand, you will become part of and associated with specific ideas, movements, and people that share those ideas and movements within your and other industries. The more you refine your brand, the more targeted your message becomes and the more you will be doing the work you want to do, with the people you want to be working with, and at a price point that everyone can agree on. 

Branding is what helps people recognise you, what you do and what you stand for. with that, you need to think about what corporate brands you work with and also other people building their personal brand. Your image and the identity that you are trying to create is based on all of these things.

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