An Idiot’s Guide to Personal Branding?
July 8th, 2009 (4:00pm) Georgina Laidlaw 5 CommentsTweet This (38)
Having studied branding very briefly in another life, I was curious about “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Branding Yourself,” by Sherry Beck Paprocki and Ray Paprocki. How would product and service brand theory be translated to the branding of people? And could a book set an ordinary human being on the path to being the next Steve Irwin/Oprah/Paris Hilton?
Despite that brief brush with brand theory years ago, I consider myself a personal branding novice, so I came to the book with an open mind. In terms of structure and coverage, it seemed well planned and comprehensive. It’s broken into four parts: “What is branding?”, “Launching your personal brand”, “Branding in the modern world” and “Brand extension and evolution.” So far, so good. There are 20 chapters in a total of 228 pages, so it’s obvious that they’re going to be pretty easy to get through.
Can you sense a “but” coming? Well, here it is.

