Defining your personal brand as a content creator.
This is not an endless ramble about my achievements (or lack thereof), neither is it a story about who I am. This is about my journey of being moulded, to become.
Growing up, I always had a strong conviction about who I was, what I stand for and what I want to do with my existence. That was until I decided to start vlogging. For all my old school readers, vlogging is simply blogging, with video being the medium of choice. Before I started vlogging, I carried out a lot of research about how to start. All roads kept leading to, defining my brand, as an individual. This was the point when everything I thought I knew about myself was put to question.
As I embarked on the daunting journey of defining myself as an individual, I was assured of a destination. I began answering the less problematic questions. You know, “name of YouTube channel?", “what influenced my decision to vlog?”, “what impact I hope to make through vlogging?” etc.
As days went by, I managed to outline some interesting facts about myself that would influence my personal brand. Then months went by and I still had no clear picture of what or who I was as a brand. I started to panic. How could I not figure this one out? Along with the panic, came the constant urge to ask friends and family what came to their minds, the instant someone mentioned my name in a conversation. The same way when one mentions Coca-Cola, we think of youthfulness, sharing and happiness. When one mentions Samsung, we think of innovation and design. Mention Oprah, and authenticity in oneself, entrepreneurship and wholesomeness come to mind. It seemed to me that the more I discovered about brand identity, the less and less I knew about what my brand could be.
After months of gathering content for my YouTube channel, it was finally time to upload it and share it with the world. However, one thing was still missing. What was my brand? I didn’t let this question deter me from uploading and posting my YouTube videos, but it affected a part of me that I so strongly thought I knew well.
With every challenge comes a lesson. My lesson is that personal branding can take months and even years. The reason being that we are not born brands. We mould ourselves into brands and this takes time, experiences and in some cases, the help of others, to become. It is easy to build brand identity when speaking of a product, but when speaking of a personality, it’s completely different. Personalities are ever evolving, learning, growing and quite honestly, complex. I’m complex and I embrace my complexities.
So, what is my brand? Every other day, I draw closer and closer, to the answer to that question. My ears and mind are open and very keen, daily. As it is in the day to day mundane activities, that I sometimes realize that this is not me, or this is me. I also recognize that I am relatively young (lol) and still have a lot to see, do and learn. As I do so, clarity as to what my brand is, will start to show. For now, I am content in the cliché saying: Time will tell.
