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Athlete Brand, Inc.: Three Essays on Personal Brand Management and Monetization on Social Media

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SYSTEMATIC REVIEW article

Personal branding: interdisciplinary systematic review and research agenda.

• Department of Management and Organization, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Personal branding has become an important concept in management literature in recent years. Yet, with more than 100 scholarly papers published on the concept to date, it has developed into a fragmented area of research with a diversity of definitions and conceptual boundaries. This paper posits that this heterogeneity of extant research impedes theoretical and empirical advancement. To strengthen the foundation for future work, we review the extant literature and offer an integrative model of personal branding. Through our systematic literature review we identify the key attributes of the construct, establish its clarity by comparing it with similar concepts in its nomological network, and suggest the definitions of personal branding and personal brand based on the reviewed literature. Further, we propose a theoretical model of personal branding summarizing the findings from the reviewed papers. The proposed model outlines the trends conducive to personal branding, as well as its drivers, processes, and outcomes. Finally, we discuss ethical implications of personal branding for both scholarly work and practice. In conclusion, we outline a further research agenda for studying personal branding as a critical career and organizational behavior activity in contemporary working environment.

Introduction

Marketing-born and reared, personal branding has made its definitive headway into management science. Sitting at the junction of marketing, sociology, communication, psychology, organizational behavior, and some would claim even accounting ( Vitberg, 2010 ), personal branding has emerged as a means of attaining career success in the context of more temporary employment systems and project based work structures.

Many reasons have prompted the emergence and penetration of the concept—personal branding—into the management discourse. Among the key is a widespread shift of the responsibility for employees' careers from organizations to individuals ( Arthur and Rousseau, 1996 ; Arthur, 2014 ; Greenhaus and Kossek, 2014 ). Indeed, business changes in traditionally stable sectors push thousands of lifetime workers out of jobs, e.g., because of the “greening” of the energy sector, or massive job cuts in the call centers, and because of the advances in artificial intelligence. More frequent career transitions require expanding and creating new networks of contacts, which, in turn, predicate more frequent personal rebranding activities ( Schlosser et al., 2017 ). With the technological advances bringing about the ease of communication across the Internet and numerous social media platforms, “careers have become personal brands that need to be managed in a virtual age” ( Gioia et al., 2014 ). When Peters (1997) wrote that everyone is a CEO of his or her own company, it must have been prescient to the labor market situation of today, where careers are boundaryless (psychological contract wanes) ( Arthur et al., 2005 ), individuals are as good as their last gig (portfolio careers) ( Cawsey, 1995 ), and “you are your own enterprise” (the need to be intelligent in career decisions) ( Arthur et al., 2017 ).

Although personal branding originated in the field of marketing ( Lair et al., 2005 ), there are now more than a hundred published papers on the topic across a range of disciplines. These papers contribute to the growing body of literature that aims to define personal branding, explain how it works, and to conceptualize it in relation to various input and output variables. Yet, this body of literature is diverse and disconnected, without any attempt so far to bring scholarly efforts together toward a more integrated understanding. No commonly accepted academic definitions or theoretical models exist. As the voice of popular press on personal branding becomes increasingly pervasive, painting a consistent picture that standard work is obsolete, that self-fulfillment is a sine qua non of success, and that organizational and personal interests are diverging ( Vallas and Cummins, 2015 ), science needs to step forward to corroborate or refute such allegations. With this literature review we aim to fill this gap.

We analyze 100 papers on personal branding published in journals representing various disciplines, with the purpose to, firstly, synthesize all definitions of personal branding stemming from different disciplines and fields of studies, and to propose a new definition that integrates multidisciplinary knowledge about the concept. Secondly, we establish the personal branding's construct clarity, by positioning personal branding as a distinct construct alongside other established concepts related to managing perceptions of others toward achieving a specific objective, such as image, fame, or self-promotion. Thirdly, we propose a conceptual model of personal branding based on the reviewed literature outlining successive inputs, processes and outputs. Finally, a future research agenda is laid out by positioning personal branding as one of the essential human activities for maintaining sustainable work and employment.

Methodology

This field of knowledge being fragmented and scarce, we conducted a systematic literature review, applying wide criteria to include all the extant academic research on personal branding. A systematic approach intends to remove subjectivity and bring about cohesion through the synthesis of available information. To ensure a comprehensive approach and minimize the bias, where applicable, we followed the PRISMA guidelines for systematic reviews, suggested by Moher et al. (2009) , related to defining the research question, setting the search parameters, extracting and appraising the relevant data, and synthesizing the findings. We followed the literature selection process used by Mol et al. (2015) , followed by the “snowballing” technique ( Greenhalgh and Peacock, 2005 ). An initial search by topic and title on Web of Science™ on April 1, 2018 returned 1183 results from all databases after applying the following restrictions: TOPIC OR TITLE: (personal brand*), Refined by: Research Domains: (Social Sciences OR Arts Humanities) AND Document Types: (Article OR Review) AND Research Areas: (Business Economics OR Psychology OR Communication OR Social Sciences Other Topics OR Sociology), Timespan: All years, Search language = Auto. Most of the articles in the topic search were related to the marketing studies of product branding, and, therefore, were excluded, as they were not relevant to the research topic of personal branding. Similarly, we did not consider non-academic papers and patents. Removing the duplicates across the topic and title search and studying the abstracts, 96 references were selected for full-text analysis. To ensure that any unindexed references are included, additional Boolean searches on the keywords “personal brand*” were carried out on EBSCO Business Source Complete restricting it by peer-reviewed publications only and on Google Scholar, returning 13 and 19 additional original references respectively; top 250 hits were manually reviewed in each search. After analyzing the full texts of the articles, 44 references were excluded for the following reasons: (a) for lacking academic rigor albeit published in peer-reviewed journals ( N = 16), (b) for lacking relevance to the topic of the study ( N = 14), and (c) for being in a language that the researcher did not know ( N = 10), and for the inability to find full text articles ( N = 4). A manual search in the reference lists of the selected articled resulted in 16 additional references added to the list. Conference proceedings and papers were included. As a result, this current review is based on the analysis of full text of 100 academic publications. This process is graphically explained in Figure 1 . Each article was subsequently analyzed in depth with the results coded under the corresponding category titles, main ones being definition, theory, model, methods, population, inputs, processes, outputs, study design, primary social media, future research recommendations.

Figure 1 . Review methodology process.

Considering that the first academic papers on the topic were published in 2005, the review period for this paper was set as 2005–2017. Since 2005, there has been an uptake in scholarly writing on the subject, and the growths in academic research and writing on the topic of personal branding follows an exponential trend line ( R 2 = 0.7416) as illustrated in Figure 2 .

Figure 2 . Total number of academic publications ( n = 98) by year included in current review. The 2018 publications ( n = 2) are excluded from this graph to prevent distortion of the exponential trend line, as the year is not over yet.

As our review reveals, research on personal branding is progressively moving from conceptualization to empirical studies, with a preference for qualitative methods. Out of the 100 reviewed papers, 34 are conceptual. 42 papers used qualitative methods, 17—quantitative, and seven used a mixed-method approach. Supplementary Table 1 lists all the reviewed papers in chronological order, together with the definition of personal branding or a personal brand , the nature of conducted research and the populations studied.

Construct Clarity and Definitions Personal Branding

Looking through the literature, we found that despite a substantial number of academic articles on the topic of personal branding suggesting a diversity of definitions, there is little agreement on the exact boundaries of the concept. Therefore, as the first step, it deems necessary to determine the construct clarity and position it in the field of related concepts. Then, we elucidate the definitions of personal branding and personal brand , clearly demarcating them as self-standing constructs. We conclude this part with the analysis of the theoretical premises for personal branding that the earlier authors based their research in.

Construct Clarity

While the authorship of the term “personal branding” in 1997 is contended by Montoya and Vandehey (2002) and Peters (1997) , some researchers indicate the origins of the concept either in Goffman's work in 1960s ( Lorgnier and O'Rourke, 2011 ; Khedher, 2015 ; Philbrick and Cleveland, 2015 ) or in the 1980s in marketing studies ( Vallas and Cummins, 2015 ). Despite these early attempts, the academic work to research personal branding as a self-standing concept only began in early 2000s.

Shepherd (2005) reviewed the popular literature on the subject and acknowledged wide acceptance of the term “personal branding.” Some researchers use the term “self-branding” ( Gandini, 2016 ), which is synonymous to personal branding. Still, this review finds that the term “personal branding” is more customary and accepted. Parmentier et al. (2013) made an attempt at the conceptual rapprochement among different definitions, stating that despite various names “the premise of much of what has been written is that some product branding concepts are sufficient for understanding how people can position themselves to be successful in any career pursuit” (p. 373). We hope to contribute further to greater construct clarity for personal branding. In order to do so, we followed the process suggested by Podsakoff et al. (2016) . We present our findings in the next four sub-sections: (1) analysis of the definitions encountered in the reviewed literature; (2) study of the related concepts in the nomological network of personal branding as informed by this literature; (3) synthesis of the key attributes of personal branding from the reviewed definitions and analyzing presence or absence of the identified attributes in the related concepts; and (4) defining personal branding and a personal brand .

Heterogeneity of Extant Definitions

Although the definitions encountered in the studied articles are diverse, they can be grouped according to the underlying theoretical approach. We have identified two main categories of those definitions: Those based in the marketing theory and those sprouting from the studies of self-presentation behaviors. The “marketing” definitions (see, for example, Lair et al., 2005 ; Marwick and boyd, 2011 ; Bendisch et al., 2013 ) tend to use words like “product,” “buyer,” “seller,” “market,” “added value,” “promise,” “differentiation,” or “meeting customer needs.” They liken personal branding to a product branding process, using similar terminology and directly applying marketing principles. The “self-presentation” definitions (see, for example, Parmentier et al., 2013 ; Molyneux, 2015 ; Schlosser et al., 2017 ) tend to include such words as “impression,” “reputation,” “individual's strengths,” “uniqueness,” “image,” “self-promotion,” or “identity.” These definitions position personal branding as a person-centric activity, focused on managing how others view the individual. Although some papers use the definitions suggested by other scholars, there is no commonly accepted way to define personal branding in either approach. Also, we find that the existing definitions, provided in Supplementary Table 1 , lack either in comprehensiveness, e.g., “active process of synthesizing and packaging a personal brand to target customers, prospective employers, and an online network of colleagues” ( Cederberg, 2017 , p. 1), rigor, e.g., “planned process in which people make efforts to market themselves” ( Khedher, 2015 , p. 20), or both, e.g., “how we want to be perceived by employers, potential employers, clients, professional peers, and others in a way that will boost short- and long-term career prospects” ( Evans, 2017 , pp. 271–272).

Related Concepts

There are seven related concepts, chosen for this exercise, as they were consistently mentioned alongside with personal branding in the reviewed literature. They belong to the same group for the reason that they deal with perceptions of others of an individual. However, the agency of managing those perceptions, the vector of action, the nature of methods and techniques, and their intent are different, which gives way to distinguishing them one from the others. Zinko and Rubin (2015) in their work on personal reputation have provided a useful overview of several concepts under consideration, including reputation, status, image, fame, celebrity, pedigree, legitimacy, credibility, branding, and impression management. In our study, we have chosen the following most relevant seven related concepts with their definitions, as they were most frequently mentioned in relation to personal branding:

• Human branding . Close et al. (2011) defined human brand as “persona, well-known or emerging, who are the subject of marketing, interpersonal, or inter-organizational communications” (p. 923). This concept comes from marketing, building upon the branding literature and extending it from products to people ( Thomson, 2006 ).

• Impression management . Kowalski and Leary (1990) defined impression management as “the process by which individuals attempt to control the impressions others form of them” (p. 34). It is the “vehicle by which professional image construction occurs” ( Roberts, 2005 ).

• Self-promotion . While Molyneux (2015) placed an equation mark between personal branding and self-promotion, we would like to disambiguate the two. Bolino et al. (2016) view self-promotion as a distinct impression management technique, when actors “are inclined to highlight their accomplishments, take credit for positive outcomes, name-drop important others, and downplay the severity of negative events to which they are connected” (p. 384).

• Image . Roberts (2005) provided an authoritative point of view on professional image, also influencing our understanding of personal branding in considering the desired and perceived components of the personal brand (see further section on Brand Architecture ). Yet, we would like to extract the “professional” part from her definition, given that image construction may occur outside of the organizational setting, so that it becomes “the aggregate of key constituents' < …> perceptions of one's competence and character” (p. 687).

• Reputation . Several authors liken reputation to a personal brand ( Noble et al., 2010 ; Schlosser et al., 2017 ), yet there are distinct differences between these concepts. Zinko and Rubin (2015) , noting that the research on reputation is not yet well-developed, propose their own definition of it: “a perceptual identity formed from the collective perceptions of others, which is reflective of the complex combination of salient personal characteristics and accomplishments, demonstrated behavior, and intended images presented over some period of time as observed directly and/or reported from secondary sources, which reduces ambiguity about expected future behavior” (p. 218). While we would disagree with the word “intended” in this definition, as reputations can be formed in the most unintended manners, this is the most robust one we have found.

• Fame . Zinko and Rubin (2015) suggested that fame equals reputation less predictability, since fame can be brought about by singular events, and later developed into reputation through repeated behavioral displays.

• Employee Branding . While not often mentioned in the literature on personal branding, this concept is very close to the one under study, differing only in few key attributes. Miles and Mangold (2004) conceptualized employee branding within the framework of internal marketing, and defined it as “the process by which employees internalize the desired brand image and are motivated to project the image to customers and other organizational constituents” (p. 68).

Clarifying the Construct of Personal Branding: Key Attributes

We will now proceed to the discussion of each of the five first-level attributes (strategic, positive, promise, person-centric, and artifactual), which were drawn from the definitions found in the reviewed literature.

Several definitions used in the reviewed literature specifically point out that personal branded activities are targeted , i.e., directed at a defined audience ( Labrecque et al., 2011 ; Cederberg, 2017 ), and programmatic , i.e., designed as a series of coordinated activities ( Lair et al., 2005 ; Manai and Holmlund, 2015 ). There are some definitions using the word strategically directly ( Marwick and boyd, 2011 ; Kleppinger and Cain, 2015 ; Nolan, 2015 ; Lee and Cavanaugh, 2016 ). For certain roles, strategic personal branding is a prerequisite. For example, Bendisch et al. (2013) discussed closing the gap between the desired identity, image, and reputation for CEO brands from the stakeholder and organizational perspectives, requiring a planful and deliberate approach. Gandini (2016) , studying digital freelance professionals in London and Milan, likens strategic personal branding to a profitable form of investment of time, labor, and relationships, essential in a reputation economy. Such concepts as “fame” actively lack these characteristics, and they are not essential for “self-promotion,” “reputation,” or “image.” Bolino et al. (2016) note that while impression management can be strategic and intentional, it also can be “unconscious and habitual” (p. 378), hence we conclude that the programmatic aspect of impression management may be missing.

The definitions of personal branding are consistent in the positive intentionality of personal branding. Authors concur that its main objective is to “establish favorable impressions” ( Lee and Cavanaugh, 2016 ), be “appealing” ( Omojola, 2008 ), and “valuable, reliable or desirable” ( De la Morena Taboada, 2014 ). We use the term “positive” as “desired by the target audience,” as indeed, there may be cases where personal branders would want to be associated with characteristics that are in ill regard by the societal norms, such as in research of male sex workers by Phua and Caras (2008) . From this perspective, we can argue that “positive” also could be “drawing attention,” following the line of reasoning that one of the objectives of personal branding is to differentiate oneself in the emerging attention economy ( Hearn, 2008b ). The inability to create a positive desired image in the minds of the target audience or a mismatch between the goal and perception is a branding failure. Labrecque et al. (2011) identified two types of personal branding failures: Insufficient branding (e.g., lack of content, failure to emphasize the desired message, etc.) and misdirected branding (e.g., inconsistencies with the brand identity, addressing wrong audiences, etc.). They offer specific advice to increase the positive attribute of a personal brand: “Reinforcement for optimal branding, augmentation for insufficient branding, and deleting or diffusing for misdirected branding” (p. 47).

The marketing nature of the personal branding construct implies the idea of signaling a promise to the target audience ( Tulchinsky, 2011 ; Philbrick and Cleveland, 2015 ). Parmentier et al. (2013) , studying positioning of personal branding in the organizational field of modeling, concluded that effective signaling of one's human, social, and cultural capital depends on successfully fitting into a specific organizational field ( cf . product brand points of parity) and standing out from the competition in that field ( cf . product brand points of differentiation). In contrast to product brands, standing out in personal branding is achieved not by having additional attributes or characteristics but having higher levels of those qualities, valued by the target audience. The most adjacent concepts related to this attribute are human branding ( Thomson, 2006 ) and employee branding ( Miles and Mangold, 2004 ), both of which are built on the foundational purpose of a brand to convey a promise. Human branding is a generic concept, which may lack agency in cases when, for instance, an advertising agency brands a movie character, rather than the actor playing that character. Employer branding lacks reflexivity as that work is conducted top-down, guided by the overall organizational objectives.

Person-Centric

This attributes comprises three second-level attributes: agency, reflective, and differentiation. The principle of agency supposes an active involvement of the subject of personal branding into the process: “Workers are encouraged to view themselves as entrepreneurs within corporate employment or while seeking corporate employment” ( Lair et al., 2005 , p. 316). While human branding, employee branding, fame, and reputation may occur without the subject's volition, personal branding demands the individual's involvement. Since personal branding requires agency and intentionality, persistent claims that “everybody has a personal brand” ( Rampersad, 2008 , p.34) are misguided, calling for a more accurate “everybody has a reputation.” Reflexivity highlights the exteriorization processes that are central to personal branding, where the subjects are required to identify individual characteristics prior to engaging in positioning of their personal brands to the outer world ( Wee and Brooks, 2010 ). We have already highlighted that human branding and employee branding may lack reflexivity as an attribute due to low agency. Finally, differentiation refers to building a personal brand around a set of characteristics that are unique and desirable by the target audience ( Parmentier et al., 2013 ). Studying personal branding of professional golfers, Hodge and Walker (2015) discuss how differentiation, or “standing out” from the competition, allowed those sportsmen to access valuable career opportunities.

Artifactual

Both personal branding and core marketing literature points out artifactual nature of branding. Examples of artifacts in personal branding go back to embroidering monograms on shirts, personalized stationary and visiting cards, or a signature at the bottom of a painting. Khedher (2015) specifically attributes artifactual displays of impression management behaviors to personal branding activities. Scholars are unanimous regarding the need for a narrative ( Brooks and Anumudu, 2016 ; Eagar and Dann, 2016 ; Pera et al., 2016 ) and related imagery ( van der Land et al., 2016 ; Holton and Molyneux, 2017 ). Several papers specifically studied the artifacts of personal branding efforts, such as narrated selfies ( Eagar and Dann, 2016 ), LinkedIn photos ( van der Land et al., 2016 ), Instagram photos ( Geurin-Eagleman and Burch, 2016 ), YouTube videos ( Chen, 2013 ), and ePortfolios ( Jones and Leverenz, 2017 ). Concepts like reputation or impression management do not necessarily require a coherent story or associated artifacts.

Juxtaposing the identified attributes with other related concepts, we determine these attributes necessary and sufficient ( Podsakoff et al., 2016 ) to demarcate the construct of personal branding as self-standing and distinct. The overview of the attributes of personal branding, compared to related concepts, is depicted in Table 1 .

Table 1 . Attributes of personal branding compared to related concepts.

Defining Personal Branding

Having identified the core attributes of the construct in question, we proceeded to elucidating its definition. Guided by the characteristics of a “good definition” ( Suddaby, 2010 ), we propose the following way to define personal branding :

Personal branding is a strategic process of creating, positioning, and maintaining a positive impression of oneself, based in a unique combination of individual characteristics, which signal a certain promise to the target audience through a differentiated narrative and imagery .

In the reviewed literature, the authors would choose to base their work either on the definition of personal branding as a process, or a personal brand as a product, or both. Hence, we offer a definition of a personal brand as well. Drawing on the definition of personal branding and one provided by Ottovordemgentschenfelde (2017) , we proceed to define a personal brand :

Personal brand is a set of characteristics of an individual (attributes, values, beliefs, etc.) rendered into the differentiated narrative and imagery with the intent of establishing a competitive advantage in the minds of the target audience .

Theoretical Foundations of Personal Branding

Personal branding, being a multidisciplinary construct, employs a wide range of distinct theories to explain it. We have grouped the theories used in the reviewed literature into four large categories: sociological, marketing, psychological, and economic.

Sociological Theories

The majority of the authors, totaling 38 papers, used sociological theories to explain the concept of personal branding. Goffman's (1959) dramaturgical perspective is most often referenced (19 papers), positioning personal branding as both a backstage activity (e.g., reflection, sense-making, etc.) and onstage performance (impression management, feedback-seeking, etc.) to influence the perceptions of others. Meyrowitz (1990) extended the dramaturgical theory into wider social and digital contexts (cited by one paper). While Goffman's work on self-presentation and social interactions is a predominant way to understand the activities around personal branding, it does not explain fully the interactions in the digital world, and it may overlook some ways to understand the outcomes of personal branding.

As an extension to Goffman's work, specific research on impression management by Kowalski and Leary (1990) , Baumeister (1982) , Gardner and Martinko (1988) , and Schlenker (1980) was mentioned in three papers. Linked to the backstage activities, four papers rely on the reflexivity theories of Giddens (1991) , Beck (1992) and Adams (2003 , 2006 ) attempt to explain how individuals build own identities in the fast-changing technological world. Five papers used Bourdieu's (1993) theories to explain accumulation of social and cultural capital in specific organizational fields, highlighting that our identities are shaped by the habitus and we are not in full control over them. Finally, Du Gay's enterprising culture theory ( Gay and Salaman, 1992 ; Du Gay, 1996 ) is used in six papers to position personal branding as a new type of labor in the post-Fordist era, working identities forged into “enterprising selves” or “flexible subjectivities.”

Marketing Theories

Shepherd (2005) noted that Kotler was first to expand the field of marketing beyond the product. Hughes (2007) , Neale et al. (2008) , and Speed et al. (2015) attributed the emergence of personal branding as a separate discipline to Keller's distinguishing the “small b” approach to branding, referring to product branding only, and the “large b,” extending the science of branding to services, organizations, and people. The work of Aaker (1997) on brand personality and brand identity is most often referenced in research on personal branding (seven papers). Thomson (2006) contributed to the stream of thinking around human brands. Eagar and Dann (2016) suggest three approaches to the self as a human brand: (1) “consumerist”—viewing human brands from the position of consumers, (2) “reputational”—assuming a passive approach in having a brand, and (3) “agency”—proactively creating and managing one's personal brand. An overwhelming majority of the extant literature on personal branding subscribes to the latter two approaches: understanding the brand equity, or the reputation, and managing the desired projected image. Overall, marketing theories were used in 17 papers.

Psychological Theories

Eleven papers used psychological theories to explain personal branding. Four papers ( Shepherd, 2005 ; Gioia et al., 2014 ; Molyneux, 2015 ; Holton and Molyneux, 2017 ; Schlosser et al., 2017 ) highlight the role of personal branding in identity formation, situating their thinking in the works of Mead (1934) , Erikson (1968) , Turner and Oakes (1986) , Ibarra (1999) , and others. Schlosser et al. (2017) even likened the narrative approach to the concept of personal branding, which “reflects how executives project their identity to others in order to demonstrate their leadership fit” (p. 574). Psychological needs were referenced in five papers, ranging from basic need for self-fulfillment and self-esteem ( Shepherd, 2005 ; Gioia et al., 2014 ; Zinko and Rubin, 2015 ) researched by Cohen (1959) and Baumeister and Leary (1995) to non-social motives, as suggested by Labrecque et al. (2011) : need for power, to pass time and provide entertainment, and need for advocacy. Finally, Shepherd (2005) and Khedher (2015) suggest that personal branding can be viewed as a self-development tool, grounding their conclusions in Schon's reflective practitioner theory ( Schon, 1984 ).

Economic Theories

The economic theories, used only in nine papers, help us understand the macro environment, in which personal branding takes place. There are a variety of attempts to describe the current economic conditions shaping social interactions: flexible accumulation ( Harvey, 1990 ), controlled discourse ( Andrejevic, 2007 ), emotional capitalism ( Illouz, 2007 ), leading to the emergence of reputation economy ( Gandini, 2016 ). Hernando and Campo (2017) used Freeman's multi-stakeholder approach to describe the complexity of brand positioning. Spence's signaling theory ( Spence, 1973 ) was used in two papers to reflect communication of unique characteristics to target audiences in imperfect markets.

Thus, we conclude that comprehensive understanding of personal branding lies on four broad social sciences: sociology, marketing, psychology, and economics. Driven by certain needs and shaping own identity (psychological perspective), an individual engages in online and offline interactions with others, trying to manage their perceptions of him/her to gain a certain benefit (sociological perspective). There are specific principles and practices of creating, positioning, and managing own brand (marketing perspective), and these activities are predicated by larger shifts in the organizational and societal contexts (economic perspective).

Trends, Drivers, Processes, and Outcomes of Personal Branding

Research on the topic is fragmented, so we used a systematic approach to synthesize the knowledge from the reviewed literature, categorizing the findings into trends, conducive to personal branding, its drivers, related processes, and outcomes. We proceed to discuss these five aspects of personal branding in separate sections below.

Trends Conducive to Personal Branding

There are three broad categories of trends that are conducive or preclusive of personal branding activities, found in the reviewed literature: Economic, societal, and technological.

Economic (6 Papers)

The basic economic premise of an imperfect market ( Hernando and Campo, 2017 ) is already a strong foundation to argue for the need to signal own value to the target audience. Another economic premise for personal branding relates to the economic reality of the modern world. The reviewed literature refers to these conditions as “era of post-Fordism” ( Vallas and Cummins, 2015 ), “knowledge economy” ( Gandini, 2016 ), “sharing economy” ( Pera et al., 2016 ), or “era of consumer-to-consumer” ( Chen, 2013 ), and most concur that the marketplace for skills has become much more demanding, coupled with increasing employment uncertainty ( Cederberg, 2017 ; Holton and Molyneux, 2017 ) and the rise of portfolio careers ( Gandini, 2016 ), all of which lead to personal branding as an effective career strategy in the new economic environment. Abrate and Viglia (2017) note that “parties operating in sharing economy platforms are incentivized to use reputation-signaling mechanisms to maximize the likelihood of a successful transaction.” (p. 4). Schlosser et al. (2017) conducted their research on career rebranding specifically within the framework of modern career agency, seen as a response to the economic changes. On the other side of the imperfect labor market, employers embrace digital as well, which results in emergence of such practices as, for instance, cybervetting ( Berkelaar, 2014 ). In a similar vein, research by van der Land et al. (2016) shows that effective management of own picture in the LinkedIn profile may lead to better chances of getting a job interview.

Societal (4 Papers)

Several researchers have attributed the societal shifts to emergence of personal branding. The generational divide and novel lifestyle choices ( Harris and Rae, 2011 ) have contributed to the need of self-promotion, both at work and in private life. Constructing a public image, previously a prerogative of celebrities, today is available to “everyday person” ( Eagar and Dann, 2016 ). Researching social media consumption on YouTube, Chen (2013) maintains that amateur individuals are embracing social media for personal branding purposes. It is noteworthy that different cultures may have varying degrees of appreciation of personal branding practices. For instance, North American blogger communities are more discerning and skeptical of someone's self-promotion activity and they place a greater value on knowledge dissemination, while Middle Eastern personal brander communities are “more praiseworthy, accepting, and less critical of the personal brander efforts at self-promotion and increasing social capital” ( Saleem and Iglesias Bedós, 2013 , p. 20). Vallas and Christin (2018) , having compared the attitudes toward personal branding among the US and French freelance web journalists, report that the French journalists are more wary of such practices than their American counterparts.

Technological (6 Papers)

There is a widespread consensus that the key driver for personal branding is the ease of access to technology, especially the Web 2.0 tools, such as social media and blogs ( Harris and Rae, 2011 ; Holton and Molyneux, 2017 ). “If once personal reputation was considered crucial for celebrities and politicians, online tools have allowed personal reputation to become an important marketing task for everyday people” ( Pera et al., 2016 , p. 45). While technology facilitates personal branding, it also makes it more difficult to differentiate oneself in “hyper-saturated and hyper-fluxed media environment” ( Ottovordemgentschenfelde, 2017 , p. 65), where digital media skills become an additional kind of brand identity. Green (2016) concurs, having performed research in professional sports area, that, when other “sporting” characteristics are similar, an online profile creates differentiation.

Drivers of Personal Branding

We have identified two broad groups of drivers pertaining to the individual doing own personal branding: Individual and role/industry-related. These factors may explain why, how, and for what reason persons engage in personal branding activities.

Individual (5 Papers)

Driven by the need for a positive personal reputation ( Zinko and Rubin, 2015 ), comprised of the need for self-esteem, need to belong and desire for rewards, certain personal characteristics, such as attributes and values, make it easier or more difficult for individuals to engage in personal branding. Pihl (2013) performed a netnographic study of three professional Swedish bloggers, which found that individual characteristics aligned with their personal brand enhance its impact and effectiveness. Lorgnier and O'Rourke (2011) identified specific skills required for personal branding: technological, metacognitive, creative and critical. Therefore, we may hypothesize that individuals with superior digital skills, who are able to discover own points of competitive differentiation and creatively turn them into compelling narrative and imagery, while doing that strategically and socially-appropriately, have greater chances of professional and personal success. In addition to that, cultural and social capitals predicate the required effort and the effectiveness of the personal branding process ( Khedher, 2015 ).

Role/Industry-Related (12 Papers)

A significant portion of literature links personal branding with the requirements, expectations, and/or limitations of specific roles and industries. Some authors make general statements that professions of today require promoting self via personal branding ( Bridgen, 2011 ; Harris and Rae, 2011 ), while others discuss specific jobs and industries. We conclude that industries with higher degree of transparency, such as sports ( Green, 2016 ) or journalism ( Brems et al., 2016 ; Holton and Molyneux, 2017 ), are more conducive to individual personal branding. At the company level, Sturdy and Wright (2008) point out that organizations adopting an enterprise model may be more lenient or even supportive of personal branding. Amoako and Okpattah (2018) , having conducted a study on sales executives in the insurance and FMCG sectors in Ghana, suggest that companies investing in personal branding of their employees may gain substantial financial benefits. As the existing research has been focused on particular populations, we observe that those personal branders belong to industries or roles conducive or indifferent to an individual's engaging in personal branding activities. It is logical to assume that some industries or roles, such as defense or police agents, may be less conducive to personal branding or even precluding of such activities. We expose the specific occupations studied, categorized by the degree of conduciveness for personal branding and the type of studied population, in Table 2 .

Table 2 . Samples studied in the reviewed literature, categorized by the degree of conduciveness for personal branding and the type of studied population.

While a greater number of articles studying executives, firm owners and high-profile political figures was expected, since much management research often begins with the upper echelons, the amount of papers on journalists' personal branding was surprising. We attribute such interest to the fact that journalism of one of the areas most impacted by the advances of social media, with the role and career of journalists currently being in a flux ( Holton and Molyneux, 2017 ). It is worthwhile noting that, according to Brems et al. (2016) , freelance journalists are more likely to engage in self-promotion and share personal information than employed journalists. This points to differences in personal branding behaviors even within a specific professional area.

Processes of Personal Branding

Several models are discussed in the reviewed literature regarding the process of personal branding, with a total of 29 papers. Some researchers quote the models from the popular literature, such as Aruda's “extract, express, and exude” ( Chen, 2013 , p. 334), or the three-step model by McNally and Speak: “(1) identify the areas where your competencies matter; (2) examine your standards and values; (3) define your style” ( Gander, 2014 , p. 101). Brooks and Anumudu (2016) examined the 10-step model used by the consultancy PriceWaterhouseCoopers to teach personal branding. Other researchers design own approaches such as Resnick et al.'s (2016) “4Ps” self-branding model. Drawing on our analysis of the reviewed papers, we single out the key processes involved in personal branding: raising self-awareness, needs analysis and positioning, constructing brand architecture, self-reflection and feedback-seeking, and sense-making.

Raising Self-Awareness

Self-awareness, introspection and critical skills ( Lorgnier and O'Rourke, 2011 ) are viewed as essential for discovering the “inner self,” a combination of self-identity, personal values and beliefs, self-image, and personal aims ( Kucharska, 2017 ). Self-discovery is the most common first assignment in personal branding courses, discussed in the reviewed literature, and scholars seem to agree that self-awareness is the initial step of the personal branding process ( García Montero et al., 2014 ; Philbrick and Cleveland, 2015 ; Cederberg, 2017 ).

Needs Analysis and Positioning

Shepherd (2005) draws our attention to the apparent misalignment between the consumer-oriented approach, advocating for ignoring the “true self” and focusing only on the needs of the target audience, and the personal branding researchers, who advise not to change oneself and build upon individual strengths. He suggests a consensus through engaging in self-reflection vis-à-vis the target audience and the competitors. Two later studies empirically tested applicability of marketing concepts to personal branding in terms of focusing on the target audience and choosing the right positioning strategy. Parmentier et al. (2013) found that to achieve and signal one's capital in the desired organizational field it is necessary to comply with the principles of brand positioning (establishing both points of parity and points of differentiation) and person brand positioning (both fitting into expectations of the field and standing our from competitors in the field). The need for differentiation or uniqueness is highlighted in several papers ( Chen, 2013 ; Gander, 2014 ; Cederberg, 2017 ). Such strategies may be specific to various organizational fields and roles. For instance, Parmentier and Fischer (2012) claim that specialization, high-level playing opportunities, revealing publically visible cues about self, and interaction with the audience are key personal branding strategies for professional athletes.

Impression management is the vehicle for positioning the personal brand ( Labrecque et al., 2011 ; Khedher, 2015 ), which can be achieved through a combination of online and offline strategies. Online activities get the greatest focus from the personal branding scholars, given the changing nature of the economic and social environment and the shift toward digital work; “branding is inevitable when participating in an online environment” ( Labrecque et al., 2011 , p. 48). Social media and Web 2.0 technology most often discussed in the reviewed literature are Twitter (13 papers), Facebook (6 papers), LinkedIn (5 papers), Instagram (3 papers), blogs (3 papers), and others (5 papers), such as MySpace, About.me, YouTube. As the role of social media in individual career management increases, digital storytelling also comes to the fore as a powerful signaling mechanism of one's worth in the labor market ( Jones and Leverenz, 2017 ).

Constructing Brand Architecture

In studying professional image , Roberts (2005) suggested two facets of the construct: Desired professional image and perceived professional image . We adhere to this line of thinking. A personal brand comprises two key elements: Desired self and perceived identity. Desired self can be understood through the dynamic approach to studying work identity ( Sveningsson and Alvesson, 2003 ; Alvesson et al., 2008 ). While McCall and Simmons (1978) conceptualized idealized self as how individuals perceived themselves according to internal values and needs, we posit desired self as how individuals want to be perceived by their target audience. Creating the personal brand is, therefore, similar to what Ibarra and Petriglieri (2010) described as “identity play,” understood as “the crafting and provisional trial of immature (i.e., as yet unelaborated) possible selves” (p. 13).

While most of the papers, discussing personal branding processes, focus on constructing and positioning desired self, only seven articles explicitly address the issue of the audience's perspective, or perceived identity , i.e., how in reality one's personal brand is perceived by others (e.g., Cederberg, 2017 ). In fact, we see this part of personal branding as the most important, as perceptions of others determine their actions toward us.

Gandini (2016) described personal branding as acquisition of reputation, so it is important to understand the concept of personal brand as both what we intend to project to the target audience (desired self), and that audience's reaction to it (perceived identity). Desired self and perceived identity will have all the brand image features, derived from the marketing science: attributes, attitudes, benefits ( Keller, 1993 ), and personality ( Aaker, 1997 ), which Manai and Holmlund (2015) refer to as “brand core,” comprised of core identity (education, skills, personality, values, experience, etc.), extended identity (abilities, attitudes, cultural aspects, etc.) and value proposition (functional, emotional, self-expressive and relationship benefits).

Self-Reflection and Feedback-Seeking

These are the two processes that enable the individuals to do maintenance of their personal brands, ensuring their relevance, strength, and competitiveness. Both procure information on the personal brand, the former being internal and the latter—external. Khedher (2015) sees both reflexivity and feedback as integral pieces of the personal branding process. Despite being critical of the way personal branding is being imposed on the society, Wee and Brooks (2010) also see its benefits, as “personal branding strategies are clearly aimed at developing reflexivity because they encourage actors to engage in careful and critical self-assessment about their relative strengths and weaknesses” (p. 47), which is consistent with the research on narrated selfies by Eagar and Dann (2016) , confirming that the sheer act of posting a narrated selfie may require a degree of reflexivity. Gioia et al. (2014) states that seeking confirmation on both positive and negative self-conceptions is a natural human behavior, based on the self-verification theory. The nature of the Web 2.0 environment where many personal branding activities take place presupposes a two-way interaction, including receiving feedback ( Holton and Molyneux, 2017 ). Labrecque et al. (2011) considers feedback essential to close the gap between desired self and perceived identity, as it helps avoiding branding failure. Both self-reflection and feedback-seeking lead to greater self-awareness.

Sensemaking

As the labor environments become decontextualized, as a consequence of technological advances, people have an increased need to construct their working identities ( Brooks and Anumudu, 2016 ). Cederberg (2017) is more categorical, specifying that “the purpose of a personal brand is to build an identity that associates specific emotions and perceptions with an individual while simultaneously managing these perceptions successfully” (p. 1). People make sense of their environment through their identity ( Walsh and Gordon, 2008 ). Since identity is a collection of meanings attached to a person by self and others ( Gecas, 1982 ), the intelligent career places the onus on the individual to make sense of those meanings. In reality, both individuals and the targets of their personal branding efforts engage in a process of reciprocal sense-making ( Gioia et al., 2014 ).

We posit, therefore, that effective sense-making, feedback-seeking, self-reflection, and greater self-awareness lead to minimizing the gap between desired self and perceived identity, resulting in a stronger and more coherent personal brand.

Outcomes of Personal Branding

While many scholar position personal branding as a career success strategy ( Parmentier et al., 2013 ; Brooks and Anumudu, 2016 ), the outcomes of personal branding are multifaceted and non-linear. Fifty-one papers specifically identified outcomes of personal branding. Labrecque et al. (2011) , acknowledging the importance of career motivation, notes that personal branding can also be used in dating, friendships or merely self-expression. Rangarajan et al. (2017) suggested a list of tangible and intangible measures of the effectiveness of a personal brand in the business setting. We synthesize the outcomes in three categories: individual and organizational, where the individual ones can be either intrinsic or extrinsic. Each category is discussed below. The number in brackets following the name of each category refers to the number of papers that discussed it (we coded “career success” as both intrinsic and extrinsic unless specified).

Individual Intrinsic Outcomes (18 Papers)

One of the outcomes of personal branding is developing greater reflexivity ( Khedher, 2015 ). This literature review leads us to conclude that effective personal branding requires self-awareness, feedback-seeking and sense-making, all of which lead to reflexivity in the attempt to position self-identity in the social environment. Some other specifically mentioned intrinsic outcomes are motivation ( Ward and Yates, 2013 ), self-realization ( Gandini, 2016 ), credibility and influence ( Ward and Yates, 2013 ), and acquiring self-promotion skills ( Edmiston, 2014 ). Therefore, we can also hypothesize that effective personal branding leads to greater self-evaluations (self-esteem and general self-efficacy) as defined by Chen et al. (2004) .

Individual Extrinsic Outcomes (50 Papers)

The majority of the reviewed papers determine the outcomes of personal branding either as furthering professional career (69%, n = 22) or creating some sort of social capital (78%, n = 25), be it power and influence ( Ward and Yates, 2013 ; Zinko and Rubin, 2015 ; Hanusch and Bruns, 2017 ), enhanced visibility ( Lee and Cavanaugh, 2016 ; Jaring and Bäck, 2017 ), or prestige ( Milovanović et al., 2015 ). Twelve papers identify differentiation as an outcome, which could enable a connection with the target audience ( Brems et al., 2016 ) and use that connection to receive a preferential treatment against those competing for same resources ( Parmentier et al., 2013 ). Ten papers directly point to monetary outcomes of effective personal branding. ( Hearn, 2008b ) summed up the outcomes of personal branding as, “the function of the branded self is purely rhetorical; its goal is to produce cultural value and, potentially, material profit” (p. 198).

Organizational Outcomes (10 Papers)

Despite the predominant view of personal branding from the position of the benefit for the person, there is emerging research linking employee branding with organizational performance. In a study of 225 Polish professionals, Kucharska and Dąbrowski (2016) found that sharing tacit knowledge, arguably a company's key competitive advantage in the knowledge economy, is positively correlated with personal branding, which is consistent with the exploratory findings of Vosloban (2012) . Zinko and Rubin (2015) distill the organizational benefits to three elements: (a) predicting individuals' behaviors, (b) basking in the reflected glory of individuals, and (c) organizational signaling. This applies not only to heads of firms ( Chen and Chung, 2016 ; Malhotra and Malhotra, 2016 ) or prominent figures in political parties ( Neale et al., 2008 ), but to any employee as personal branding promotes the ideology of enterprise ( Sturdy and Wright, 2008 ).

Integration and a Conceptual Model

Derived from the knowledge in the reviewed literature and the analysis presented above, a conceptual personal branding model emerges as a result. Figure 3 demonstrates the relationships among the key elements of the model, each of which has been discussed above.

Figure 3 . Personal branding model.

By definition, personal branding is a dynamic construct, subject to ongoing adjustment and change. Personal brands need maintenance ( Lorgnier and O'Rourke, 2011 ), i.e., persistent reassessment and monitoring ( Cederberg, 2017 ), which is achieved through constantly repeating the processes described above. This is particularly relevant at the points of career transitions. Schlosser et al. (2017) found that “executives must revisit their personal brands, deciding how to best position their skills and knowledge and values within the context of their new < …> organizations” (p. 576) at each transitional stage. In a study of personal branding in organizational settings Sturdy and Wright (2008) discovered that consultants making a career transition into the corporate labor market need to “trade” their elite personal brand for one that is consistent with the new organization's culture, in order to be effective. When personal branding happens online, the process stages are not discrete and sequential but overarching ( Tarnovskaya, 2017 ), so “when a personal brand is born online, its enforcement and maintenance become critical immediately” (p. 33). All of this evidence leads us to conclude that personal branding is an ongoing process, requiring constant re-evaluation and maintenance.

Ethical and Social Considerations

A particular set of findings deals with the ethical and social considerations of personal branding. Irrespective of the definitions, theory, or the model, scholars debate the ethical nature of the branded self in contemporary careers. We have identified four directions of such debate: egalitarianism vs. elitism of personal branding, commodification of self, blurring the line between the personal and professional lives, and teaching personal branding. We proceed to examine these in more detail.

Lair et al. (2005) were the first researchers to raise the ethical questions associated with personal branding, focusing on three areas: gender, race, and culture. They were primarily analyzing at the US labor market, but, e.g., Saleem and Iglesias Bedós (2013) also questioned across the board applicability of personal branding practices in various cultural contents. However, such differences also benefit the individual. Although in a very specific industry of sexual services, Phua and Caras (2008) point out that ethnicity, race, or nationality can be a differentiating factor in personal branding, while gender not being statistically significant. Content analysis of Instagram photos of Olympic athletes revealed that sexually suggestive photos are most popular ( Geurin-Eagleman and Burch, 2016 ). While this lends itself to a discussion on morality of personal branding methods, it also leads us to the conclusion that gender, race and culture issues associated with personal branding are situation-dependent.

The ethical debate of today centers around the concept of commodification with polarized opinions on personal branding as the new savoir-être of the new shared, digital and freelance economy ( Gandini, 2016 ) vis-à-vis the self being “a commodity for sale in the labor market, which must generate its own rhetorically persuasive packaging, its own promotional skin, within the confines of the dominant corporate imaginary” ( Hearn, 2008b , p. 201). This pervasive messaging to brand oneself may be misused by mass media, e.g., reality television, to take advantage of most “precarious individuals and groups” to expose their insecurities to the public in exchange for creating a stronger personal brand ( Hearn, 2008a ). Sociologists are concerned that not only our selves become commodified, but also a new type of labor—the digital work of managing own professional identity online—is being thrust on the workers in the realities of post-Fordist capitalism. Vallas and Cummins (2015) even use the word “coercive” to describe the vigor with which personal branding is being introduced to the workforce. They also question the applicability of marketing techniques used for selling shampoo or washing machines to branding individuals. Yet, in their research they found that outward rejection of personal branding was rare, and in general the interviewees demonstrated an “active embrace of branding discourse, coupled with an acknowledgment that one ought to engage in a determined effort to refine one's brand as a condition of one's success and personal fulfillment” (p. 311).

Yet, the requirements of the “knowledge” or “reputation” economy blur the lines between the personal and professional. Labrecque et al. (2011) found that “separating social and professional worlds appears nearly impossible without the proper mechanisms for control” (p. 49). Several studies were conducted around the reporter profession. Conducting interviews with reporters, Molyneux (2015) discovered a sense of uneasiness as they lacked knowledge and skills of balancing professional and personal identities with no clear guidance from their employers. We see that in this specific organizational field, reporters are not aggressively pursuing personal branding, and particularly newspaper reporters being the least motivated to do so ( Schultz and Sheffer, 2012 ). The hypothesis here could be that professions that are most dependent on social media and Web 2.0 technologies require a higher degree of personal branding, while it is less of a necessity for more traditional fields, which is consistent with the research in the entrepreneurial environment ( Pihl, 2013 ; Gandini, 2016 ). Examining personal brand positioning of journalists on Twitter, Ottovordemgentschenfelde (2017) discovered that they had to manage three identities at the same time—organizational, professional, and personal. This expands the existing role of a worker and adds additional tasks to perform without lowering the employer's performance expectations. This creates a conflict that many employees may not know how to manage. Unfortunately, the popular literature, urging everyone to delve into personal branding, provides little advice on how to deal with such quandaries ( Pihl, 2013 ).

Another ethical point related to the protecting the private space is dissemination of private information. Marwick and boyd (2011) found that social media users operate within the assumption that their imagined audiences are bounded, while, in reality, the cyberspace is limitless. This dialectic pressure between the need to expose oneself in order to self-brand and the need to control own content and the personal boundaries is one of the findings in the study of Labrecque et al. (2011) .

Finally, teaching personal branding is a point of concern, too. The issue of the curricula for personal branding and the practical challenge of preparing people to be effective personal branders were raised as early as 2005 in academic sources ( Shepherd, 2005 ). Out of the 100 reviewed articles, 11 deal with teaching personal branding, suggesting various curricula ( Edmiston, 2014 ; Johnson, 2017 ) and estimating effectiveness of different assignments in teaching personal branding skills ( McCorkle and McCorkle, 2012 ; Wetsch, 2012 ; Stanton and Stanton, 2013 ; Jones and Leverenz, 2017 ). This review demonstrated that there is limited understanding and concurrence on the concepts and processes; therefore teaching unproven ideas raises ethical issues in itself. While some studies report teaching personal branding as a means to developing accompanying skills, such as awareness of online communication issues or metacognitive, creative, and critical thinking skills ( Lorgnier and O'Rourke, 2011 ), most of the papers mentioned in this section teach personal branding as a core subject. For better or worse, the popularity of personal branding has created an industry, which is ahead of the academic thought. Brooks and Anumudu (2016) found that “trainers, career and vocational development consultants, and personal branding enthusiasts publish books and articles and conduct workshops to teach individuals to build their personal brands to become more employable and successful” (p. 24). The contemporary career frameworks (boundaryless, portfolio, intelligent, Protean) share the same underlying assumption that career changes will become more frequent and personal agency will increase. Therefore, such individuals need to be supported by bona fide training on how to thrive in the modern employment environment. The demand has already been vocalized to identify the skills required for effective personal branding ( Manai and Holmlund, 2015 ), develop the content of such training ( Lorgnier and O'Rourke, 2011 ), and provide guidance on the decision to engage in personal branding vs. remaining digitally invisible ( Kleppinger and Cain, 2015 ). However, furthering the ethical debate, Pagis and Ailon (2017) point out that learning the complex personal branding skills may not be accessible to all.

Discussion and Future Directions

This systematic review is the first attempt to look at the academic literature pertaining to personal branding comprehensively. Having reviewed the selected 100 papers, we have (a) provided a definition of personal branding and a personal brand that is more comprehensive, rigorous and detailed than the existing ones and that can help to distinguish these concepts from related ones, and (b) offered a conceptual model capturing inputs, processes, and outputs of personal branding. These findings and this systematic literature review as a whole suggest important directions for future research on personal branding that we discuss below.

Developing a New Measurement Instrument of Personal Branding

While many authors have indicated the need for aligning similar concepts across the related fields ( Zinko and Rubin, 2015 ), as well as developing a comprehensive personal (re-) branding framework ( Resnick et al., 2016 ; Schlosser et al., 2017 ), only in this paper we have provided an extension to the existing body of research by offering an integrative definition of personal branding . By following Podsakoff et al. (2016) rigorous approach toward greater construct clarity through identifying its key attributes and positioning personal branding as a self-standing concept in the nomological field, we outlined its distinct differentiating properties. The introduction of the integrative definition of personal branding warrants development of a new measurement instrument of personal branding. While Chen and Chung (2016) already developed a scale to measure the personal brand of a business CEO, we question its validity, due to lack of rigor in the process of scale development and validation. Therefore we hope that the new definition will stimulate much needed personal branding scale development and validation for moving the field further.

Empirically Testing the Proposed Personal Branding Model

When developing a conceptual personal branding model, we found that 26 papers discussed the antecedents of personal branding, and 51 papers discussed the outcomes, while only 29 papers focused on the processes. This points toward lacunae in academic knowledge of personal branding that needs further investigation. Understanding the antecedents and outcomes of personal branding is critical for further theory building and field research. By providing an integrative model we offer fresh avenues for future research and join other scholars' calls for empirical testing of conceptual models of personal branding ( Bendisch et al., 2013 ; Dumitriu and Ciobanu, 2015 ; Johns and English, 2016 ).

Studying Personal Branding in the Organizational Context

Our review reveals that a small group of researchers specifically point in the direction of studying the person vs. organization tension resulting from personal branding ( Hughes, 2007 ; Bendisch et al., 2013 ; Karaduman, 2013 ; Nolan, 2015 ; Zinko and Rubin, 2015 ; Ottovordemgentschenfelde, 2017 ). Only few studies related to the organizational/corporate setting exist ( Korzynski, 2012 ; Vosloban, 2012 ; Kucharska and Dąbrowski, 2016 ). Given the discussed tensions between personal and organizational, the managerial attitudes toward employee personal branding call for further research of organizational practices (e.g., guidelines, communication) and employees' activities (e.g., co-branding, signaling). Hence, it may be opportune to converge the studies of careers and human resources management, which traditionally have been apart. Although novel and unconventional, it may prove necessary. Firms must embrace the new reality of workers with strong personal brands overreaching the organizational boundaries. For instance, Kucharska (2017) suggested that the co-branding concept is also applicable to personal brands. So, one of the areas of future research could be examining whether constructing a working identity through personal branding is a source of greater employee loyalty, intrapreneurship intentions, innovation, new clients, and an indication of a stronger employer brand.

Studying the Sustainability and Transferability of Personal Branding

This literature review shows that there is a host of issues regarding the veracity of personal branding ( Hughes, 2007 ), portability of personal brands ( Parmentier et al., 2013 ), and their sustainability ( Bendisch et al., 2013 ). We wish to see further contributions to the ongoing scholarly debate about whether having multiple personal brands is possible, how to adapt one's personal brand when changing employers, and how to avoid the spillover from private social media activities into the professional sphere. Furthermore, up to date the research has only focused on the industries that are most conducive for personal branding. We do not know much about the challenges of creating and maintaining personal brands in settings that are not conducive or outright preclusive of self-promotion, at least, to the outside world. The limited amount of industries and roles studied to date, as well as small samples in those studies, renders scarce opportunities to generalize the knowledge and make conclusive statements about extrapolating the findings. Additionally, the majority of the empirical studies took place in European, Australian, or North American settings, so the possible research directions could lead scholars to test the theoretical premises of personal branding in other cultures.

We conclude that the academic interest in the concept of personal branding is growing, and that a better understanding of how a personal brand is constructed and managed in the modern labor markets characterized by frequent job changes, project-based work engagements, and increasing job insecurity is needed. This literature review contributes to the field of personal branding by consolidating the extant research, proposing an integrative definition of personal branding and personal brand, developing a conceptual personal branding model, and discussing future research directions that could stimulate the advancement of our knowledge on the topic.

By showing that personal branding is a distinct construct that spans a number of disciplines, we point to an opportunity for a closer integration of traditionally individual-driven career efforts and organization-driven human resources practices to help the employees create effective personal brands, benefitting both the individual and the firm. This paper casts but a glimpse of light into the confusion and uncertainty around the merging spheres of personal and professional. Research and practice have a chance to expand the theory and provide guidance on successfully navigating the current employment reality.

Author Contributions

SG is a PhD candidate, who is the main author of the submitted paper. SK and EL are PhD supervisors. SG was responsible for identifying relevant papers under the supervision of SK, who has expertise in literature review writing. SG also did the initial analysis of the paper and wrote the initial draft. In the consequent process SK and EL helped to develop the paper toward the final submission.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Supplementary Material

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02238/full#supplementary-material

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Keywords: personal branding, personal brand, self-presentation, self-marketing, career

Citation: Gorbatov S, Khapova SN and Lysova EI (2018) Personal Branding: Interdisciplinary Systematic Review and Research Agenda. Front. Psychol . 9:2238. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02238

Received: 27 June 2018; Accepted: 29 October 2018; Published: 21 November 2018.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2018 Gorbatov, Khapova and Lysova. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Sergey Gorbatov, [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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Get Noticed to Get Ahead: The Impact of Personal Branding on Career Success

Associated data.

The datasets generated for this study are available on request to the corresponding author.

There is a growing amount of attention being brought to personal branding as an effective career behavior, but little is known about the factors that predict personal branding behaviors and their outcomes. In two studies ( N = 477) across two distinctly different cultural contexts (Western and Asian) based on a newly developed and validated scale of personal branding, we have examined the antecedents and outcomes of personal branding. The findings confirm that personal branding leads to greater career satisfaction, fully mediated by perceived employability. Career achievement aspiration was the strongest predictor of engaging in personal branding, while career feedback negatively related to personal branding intention and career self-efficacy positively related to personal branding but not to personal branding intention. These findings highlight the importance of personal branding as a contemporary career technique in promoting one’s personal brand identity to achieve beneficial career outcomes.

Introduction

The contemporary employment environment and increased amount of flexible work arrangements require individuals to become much more market oriented ( Lair et al., 2005 ; Manai and Holmlund, 2015 ). One concept that captures such personal marketing orientation is personal branding , which refers to “a strategic process of creating, positioning, and maintaining a positive impression of oneself, based in a unique combination of individual characteristics, which signal a certain promise to the target audience through a differentiated narrative and imagery” ( Gorbatov et al., 2018 , p. 6). Research shows that personal branding helps individuals to attain positive career outcomes, among which are social capital ( Gandini, 2016 ; Paivi and Back, 2017 ; Tarnovskaya, 2017 ), financial rewards ( Close et al., 2011 ; Rangarajan et al., 2017 ), and career opportunities ( Parmentier et al., 2013 ; Schlosser et al., 2017 ).

Increasingly, individuals today do their work through the Internet (e.g., gig-work), where “self-branding in the knowledge economy is a device for self-promotion for the pursuit of self-realization” ( Gandini, 2016 , p. 124). This global trend of digitalization for many career seekers means an opportunity to offer their skills and competencies globally and across boundaries of industries and organizations. This is done through personal branding, or in other words, through making one’s individual value proposition known to the target audience. As a concept, personal branding comes from the marketing literature ( Lair et al., 2005 ; Shepherd, 2005 ). Although it is still considered to be a new concept, there are already more than 100 papers published on the topic of personal branding in the organizational behavior literature, as evidenced by a recent literature review by Gorbatov et al. (2018) . Yet, due to the paucity of quantitative empirical studies on personal branding, none of this research gives a clear answer to the question of what the antecedents and outcomes of personal branding are in the career context. Addressing this research gap is urgent and relevant given the growing number of individuals who engage in personal branding behaviors on the Internet and, specifically, social media.

In this paper, we aim to fill this research gap by developing and testing a model of antecedents and outcomes of personal branding in the Western and Asian cultural contexts. The main focus of this paper is to test the theoretical relationships between personal branding and other career constructs. As no validated measure of personal branding existed, we had to develop one. In doing so, we followed the approach of Carmeli et al. (2015) , who created a measure of respective engagement as a preliminary step to empirical testing of their hypotheses. Consequently, we first developed a personal branding scale, and, in Study 1, we then cross-validated this measure and explored the relationship between personal branding and its outcomes (i.e., perceived employability and career satisfaction). In Study 2, building on the theory of planned behavior ( Ajzen, 1991 ), we examined the antecedents of personal branding.

Thus, epistemologically, we extend the extant career theory to incorporate personal branding as an increasingly important career tool in the contemporary digitalized work environment. Second, we explore the ontology of the relationships between personal branding and other related concepts, such as career aspiration, employability, and career satisfaction. Finally, we make a methodological contribution by developing and validating a personal branding scale, enabling future research in the field.

Theoretical Background

Personal branding.

The concept of personal branding originated in marketing research ( Keller, 1993 ; Keller and Lehmann, 2006 ) and since then entered the field of organizational and vocational studies as a type of proactive work behavior ( Crant, 2000 , p. 436). The definition of personal branding establishes it as a proactive work behavior that employs marketing strategies and tactics to achieve career benefits in three distinct ways: strategic, differentiated, and technology based. First, while some other self-presentation behaviors from the same nomological field, such as impression management, may be both conscious and unconscious ( Bolino et al., 2016 ), personal branding is strategic, which means that the activities are coordinated and point in a defined direction, targeting a specific audience. Second, effective personal branding achieves differentiation of the marketed self, conveying valued and unique individual characteristics against the competition or the frame of reference. It signals benefits or communicates a promise to deliver an outcome valued by others, while fitting into the expectations of a field ( Parmentier et al., 2013 ). In the studies of human behavior, this is known as “optimal distinctiveness,” or the competing needs for assimilation and inclusion and the need for differentiation from the in-group ( Brewer, 1991 ; Leonardelli et al., 2010 ). Finally, personal branding today heavily relies on technology as the primary vehicle to convey imagery (e.g., logo, photos, and work samples) and related storytelling to the target audience. Textual and visual performances make personal branding tangible and real ( Pera et al., 2016 ; Pagis and Ailon, 2017 ), resulting in a stream of studies examining the use of technology for personal branding, such as LinkedIn profile photos ( van der Land et al., 2016 ; Tifferet and Vilnai-Yavetz, 2018 ), Facebook profiles ( Labrecque et al., 2011 ), Instagram photos ( Geurin-Eagleman and Burch, 2016 ), YouTube channels ( Chen, 2013 ), academic portals ResearchGate and Mendeley ( Van Noorden, 2014 ), and Twitter activity ( Brems et al., 2017 ; Hedman, 2017 ). Technology also allows career seekers to estimate the effectiveness of personal branding activities, which is essential for sense making and applying any corrective measures when necessary.

In sum, personal branding as an intentional individual career behavior emerged in response to the increasing emergence of new communication technologies in all parts of people’s lives and work as well as the changes in the labor market and the employer-employee relationship ( Vallas and Christin, 2018 ). In these new forms of employment, personal branding is an important factor of career success ( Shepherd, 2005 ; Parmentier et al., 2013 ; Gioia et al., 2014 ) as an adaptable career behavior aimed at packaging and presenting one’s professional identity to meet the needs of the target audience.

Personal Branding and Career Outcomes

Traditionally, career outcomes have been conceptualized as career success including largely objective and, to a lesser extent, subjective facets. As such, career success is defined as “the accomplishment of desirable work-related outcomes at any point in a person’s work experiences over time” ( Arthur et al., 2005 , p. 179). This traditional conceptualization of career outcomes is relevant for employees who work in a single company during their whole employment ( Wang and Wanberg, 2017 ). Today, however, individuals move from firm to firm and from job to a job frequently, and they also find themselves in novel employment relationships, such as freelancing ( van den Born and van Witteloostuijn, 2013 ; Kuhn, 2016 ), temporary and contract working conditions ( Davis-Blake and Uzzi, 1993 ), and recareering or mid- and late-career changes ( Wöhrmann et al., 2014 ; Rice, 2015 ; Robertson, 2017 ). Career outcome criteria other than objective career success are therefore more important to contemporary workers.

Career satisfaction is an important subjective career outcome, and it is shown to be the result of processes requiring agency in managing one’s career, such as career self-management ( King, 2004 ), impression management ( Cheng et al., 2014 ), and career adaptability ( Rudolph et al., 2017 ). For example, studying 195 employee-supervisor dyads from various industries in Taiwan, Cheng et al. (2014) showed that individuals who employed self-promotion behaviors showed greater career satisfaction compared to those who did not employ such behaviors. Since personal branding and self-promotion are self-presentation behaviors, we hypothesized that personal branding would also be positively related to career satisfaction.

Hypothesis 1a : Personal branding is positively related to career satisfaction.

Perceived employability, defined as “one’s ability to identify and realize career opportunities” ( Fugate et al., 2004 , p. 23), is also considered to be one of the leading career outcomes of contemporary employees. In line with the employability research, and with its focus on the individual positive assessment of his/her marketability on the external and internal job markets, we propose that efforts made in promoting oneself through personal branding will lead to higher perceived employability. One of the central processes in personal branding is constructing the desired professional image of self, and there is evidence that clarity of professional self positively impacts employability ( Lysova et al., 2018 ).

Hypothesis 1b : Personal branding is positively related to perceived employability.

Furthermore, perceived employability is expected to mediate the relationship between personal branding and higher career satisfaction. This is supported by recent findings that employability is positively related to career satisfaction. For example, studies have shown that career satisfaction is an outcome of both career adaptability ( Rudolph et al., 2017 ) and a stronger sense of professional identity ( McKevitt et al., 2017 ). The mediating effect of employability of the relationship between emotional self-efficacy and career satisfaction was examined, for example, by Dacre Pool and Qualter (2013) , who found that employability mediated the relationship between emotional self-efficacy and career satisfaction. Besides, personal branding has a signaling function. By communicating one’s professional value, individuals can reduce the information asymmetry problem in the labor market to their advantage ( Zinko and Rubin, 2015 ) to achieve the desired differentiation, as signaling is positively related with career success ( Ramaswami et al., 2010 ). Finally, people who engage in personal branding have high social capital ( Bourdieu, 1993 ); they engage in such activities as communicating their own value proposition or informing others of personal achievements. Social capital was found to be positively related to career success ( Parmentier et al., 2013 ; Delisle and Parmentier, 2016 ; Caro Castaño, 2017 ). Seibert et al. (2001a , b) demonstrated how greater social capital in the form of access to information, access to resources, and career sponsorship leads to increased career satisfaction.

Hypothesis 1c : Perceived employability mediates the relationship between personal branding and career satisfaction.

To test the hypotheses, we developed a measurement of personal branding and conducted two studies. The purpose of Study 1 was to explore the relationship between personal branding, perceived employability, and career satisfaction, while cross-validating the new measurement instrument; we examined the antecedents of personal branding in Study 2.

Personal Branding Measurement Development

We constructed the scales to measure personal branding, using the Likert method as described by Dawis (1987) . Drawing from the construct definition, we collected a pool of 39 items (15 for strategic, 11 for differentiated, and 13 for technologically savvy) that were reviewed for clarity and content validity by an industrial and organizational psychologist and a marketing professor (the full list can be obtained from the corresponding author). All items were answered using a five-point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree , 5 = strongly agree ).

We recruited 1,001 participants on the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform, where they completed the survey for pay. Since Fokkema and Greiff (2017) advised against performing EFA and CFA on the same sample, we split the sample into two to perform the exploratory (EFA) and confirmatory (CFA) factor analyses separately according to employment status to establish that the scale works well for both workers and job seekers. We split the sample by the employment status of the respondents to examine whether the EFA and CFA results would be consistent across these different groups. The invariance analysis revealed that there were no statistically significant variances in the measurement model across the two groups.

Exploratory Factor Analysis

We conducted the EFA on the population of the sample who were not in full employment ( N = 204): female = 54.9%; average age = 33; US (97 cases, 47.5%), India (60 cases, 29.4%), other countries not exceeding 5% of the total sample. The employment status of the respondents was as follows: employed, part time = 72.5%; not employed, looking for work = 14.7%; not employed, not looking for work = 7.4%; retired = 4.9%; disabled, not able to work = 0.5%. We used principal factor analysis with promax rotation ( Osborne and Fitzpatrick, 2012 ) in SPSS to examine the potential factor structure of the scale. We iteratively removed the items with loadings <0.35 as well as items that cross-loaded >0.35 two or more factors.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis

CFA was performed on the employed population of the Mechanical Turk sample ( N = 797): female = 44.5%; average age = 33; US = 56.2%, India = 35.8%, other countries not exceeding 2% of the total sample. In a conservative approach, we used seven indices to assess model fit ( Noar, 2003 ; Schreiber et al., 2006 ): Chi-square/df ratio ( χ 2 /df); relative fit indices—normed fit index (NFI), incremental fit index (IFI), Tucker Lewis index (TLI), comparative fit index (CFI), and parsimony-adjusted measures—root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA); and p of close fit ( p close ).

To demonstrate the equivalence of all items designed to measure personal branding across various samples, we performed invariance testing of the scale by analyzing the differences across genders in the unconstrained, constrained measurement weights, constrained structural covariances, and fully constrained models.

The EFA yielded a three-factor structure comprised of 18 items. The Cronbach’s alphas for the three factors were 0.80, 0.83, and 0.90—above the acceptable cut off point of 0.70 ( Nunnally and Bernstein, 1994 ). Together, the three factors explained 58.7% of the variance, with correlations among them of 0.46, 0.53, and 0.61 ( p < 0.001), supporting their distinctiveness.

The initial CFA on the employed part of the sample confirmed the three-factor model, and its fit indices were acceptable ( χ 2 /df = 4.02; NFI = 0.92; IFI = 0.94; TLI = 0.93; CFI = 0.94; and RMSEA = 0.06, where p close < 0.001). The standardized regression weights for all items were greater than 0.50. Table 1 summarizes the EFA and CFA outcomes.

Personal branding scale items and their factor loadings.

λ, standardized regression weight (all p’s < 0.001); α 1 , Cronbach’s alpha for the factor in the EFA study; α 2 , Cronbach’s alpha for the factor in the CFA study .

As there is some evidence that women may engage in personal branding differently than men ( Rui and Stefanone, 2013 ; Thompson-Whiteside et al., 2018 ), it was important to establish invariance of the scale across genders. The scalar invariance testing returned values of p greater than 0.05 in all instances when the measurement weights, structural covariances, and measurement residuals were constrained ( Table 2 ). This allowed us to reject the null hypothesis that there are statistically significant variances in the measurement model across genders.

Invariance testing.

N = 797. CFI, comparative fit index; NFI, normed fit index; IFI, incremental fit index; TLI, Tucker Lewis index .

Throughout the subsequent studies, we continue to establish the predictive validity of the personal branding scale.

The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between the outcome measures of personal branding, while testing the newly developed personal branding scale to establish its external validity.

Participants

We collected 306 responses via an online survey that was distributed by two master’s students at a large public university in the Netherlands to people in their networks (e.g., classmates, friends, professional contacts, etc.) in accordance with the research ethics regulations of that university. Completing the survey was anonymous and the participants could withdraw at any moment. After the initial visual and boxplot analyses, 43 responses were removed because of acquiescing responding (i.e., providing same values for all items) or missing values in the key variables of interest, which resulted in an analyzable sample of 263 cases (female = 58.6%; Mean Age = 27 (SD = 9.5); the Netherlands = 71.9%, China = 23.2%; employed part-time = 45.6%, employed full-time = 30%, not employed, not looking for work = 14.8%, not employed, looking for work = 8.4%; and 5 years of work experience or less = 65%).

Answers to all variables were given on a five-point scale ranging from 1 ( strongly disagree ) to 5 ( strongly agree ).

Personal branding was measured by the 18-item scale developed in this paper. Cronbach’s alpha for the overall scale was 0.87. The alphas for the three factors of the scale (strategic, differentiated, and technologically savvy) were 0.77, 0.73, and 0.83, respectively. As we were interested in overall personal branding behavior rather than its subfactors, we chose to stay at the higher scale level.

Perceived employability was measured with the five-item scale developed by Berntson and Marklund (2007) . An example item was “My experience is in demand on the labor market.” Cronbach’s alpha was 0.76.

Career satisfaction was measured with a four-item scale by Turban and Dougherty (1994) . An example item was “Given my age, my career is on or ahead of schedule.” Cronbach’s alpha was 0.83.

We used gender and age as control variables, given earlier findings that men and women approach personal branding differently ( Lobpries et al., 2018 ; Thompson-Whiteside et al., 2018 ) and an assumption that there will be variance across generations in the abilities to strategically differentiate self in the labor market and the technological savvy to do so effectively online ( Reisenwitz and Iyer, 2009 ).

Analytical Strategy

The analyses were performed in two steps using the AMOS software ( Arbuckle, 2017 ). In the first step, the measurement model was tested. We performed a series of CFAs to establish the discriminant validity of the constructs in the model. In the second step, we used structural equation modeling (SEM) to test the theoretical model, using the maximum likelihood method of estimation. To assess the fit of the models, we used various measures: χ 2 /df, CFI, TLI, RMSEA, and SRMR ( Browne and Cudeck, 1993 ; Hu and Bentler, 1999 ; Kline, 2016 ). To estimate the indirect effects, accounting for multivariate non-normality of the data, we used bootstrapping technique with 5,000 bootstrapping samples and 95% confidence intervals ( Preacher et al., 2010 ; Kline, 2016 ). Bootstrapping does not assume the sampling distribution as normal and performs iterative resampling analyses, resulting in more accurate confidence intervals of indirect effects as it derives the estimates of the parameters of the model strictly from the sample ( Preacher and Hayes, 2008 ).

Measurement Model

The measurement model, including three latent variables (i.e., personal branding, perceived employability, and career satisfaction), showed an acceptable fit to the data: χ 2 = 529.40, df = 315, χ 2 /df = 1.68, p < 0.001, CFI = 0.91, TLI = 0.90, RMSEA = 0.05 ( p close = 0.41), and SRMR = 0.06. This model’s fit was better than the fit of the model where all the variables loaded on one latent factor ( χ 2 = 773.32, df = 318, χ 2 /df = 2.43, p < 0.001, CFI = 0.81, TLI = 0.78, RMSEA = 0.07 ( p close < 0.001), SRMR = 0.11, ∆ χ 2 = 243.92, df = 3, p < 0.001). All the items had significant loadings on the intended factors (range λ = 0.41–0.86, p ’s < 0.001).

Descriptive Statistics

Means, standard deviations, and correlations among all the study variables are shown in Table 3 . Contrary to our expectations, neither age nor gender had significant correlations with any of the dependent variables, and we therefore continued with the analyses without these measures. Personal branding was moderately correlated with perceived employability ( r = 0.48, p < 0.01) and weakly correlated with career satisfaction ( r = 0.28, p < 0.01), indicating a more distal relationship with the latter. As expected, perceived employability was significantly correlated with career satisfaction ( r = 0.48, p < 0.01).

Study 1 variables’ means, standard deviations (SD), and correlations.

N = 263. Cronbach’s alphas are displayed in bold on the diagonal .

Hypotheses Testing

The mediation model where personal branding influences career satisfaction via perceived employability showed an acceptable fit to the data: χ 2 = 529.40, df = 315, χ 2 /df = 1.68, p < 0.001, CFI = 0.91, TLI = 0.90, RMSEA = 0.05 ( p close = 0.41), SRMR = 0.06. We tested two alternative models: a full mediation model and a model where perceived employability impacts career satisfaction via personal branding (i.e., personal branding is a mediator). The full mediation model was not significantly different from the baseline partial mediation one: χ 2 = 530.70, df = 316, χ 2 /df = 1.68, p < 0.001, CFI = 0.91, TLI = 0.90, RMSEA = 0.05 ( p close = 0.41), SRMR = 0.06, ∆ χ 2 = 1.3, df = 1, p = 0.254. The model with personal branding as a mediator showed a poorer fit: χ 2 = 575.82, df = 316, χ 2 /df = 1.82, p < 0.001, CFI = 0.89, TLI = 0.88, RMSEA = 0.06 ( p close = 0.08), SRMR = 0.07, ∆ χ 2 = 46.42, df = 1, p < 0.001. We therefore proceeded with the analyses on the baseline model.

We proposed that personal branding is positively related to perceived employability and career satisfaction via perceived employability. In line with these hypotheses, the SEM results indicated that personal branding positively and significantly related to perceived employability ( γ = 0.61, p < 0.001), and perceived employability positively and significantly related to career satisfaction ( β = 0.70, p < 0.001); the relationship between personal branding and career satisfaction when accounting for perceived employability, however, was non-significant ( γ = −0.11, p = 0.34). The model indicated a significant indirect effect of personal branding on career satisfaction through perceived employability [ indirect effect = 0.63, 95% BCa CI (0.36; 1.16), p < 0.001], as graphically represented in Figure 1 . Thus, Hypotheses 1a–1c were supported.

Final mediation model showing the positive effect of personal branding on career satisfaction is mediated by one’s perceived employability (Study 1). Regression results are reported as standardized betas. *** p < 0.001. This model explains 43% of the variance [ R 2 = 0.43, 95% CI (0.24–0.61)].

The findings of Study 1 show that, in line with our hypotheses, personal branding had a positive and significant indirect effect on career satisfaction via perceived employability. It means that, by itself, personal branding does not impact satisfaction with one’s career. However, personal branding implies taking proactive career-enhancing steps and clarifying the desired professional future self in the future ( Strauss et al., 2012 ). This is positively related to perceived employability, which, in turn, has been proven to lead to greater career satisfaction.

Having established the positive relationship of personal branding and perceived employability, the aim of the second study was to focus on the antecedents of personal branding. Given that the relationship between perceived employability and career satisfaction is well studied and described in many papers ( De Vos et al., 2011 ; Dacre Pool and Qualter, 2013 ; Lo Presti et al., 2018 ), we left only perceived employability as the outcome of personal branding for the sake of model simplicity.

To understand the reasons why individuals may engage in personal branding, we framed its antecedents in the theory of planned behavior (TPB; Ajzen, 1991 ). The TPB posits that, in order for a behavior to be performed, three determinants of intention must be satisfied: attitude, subjective norm, and perceived behavioral control ( Ajzen, 1991 ). These determinants strengthen or weaken the behavioral intention , which, in turn, predicts the enactment of that behavior.

First, the attitude toward engaging in personal branding to achieve greater career success must be positive. Such attitude is encapsulated in the concept of career achievement aspiration ( Gregor and O’Brien, 2016 ). While some authors allow a possibility of personal branding for other purposes, such as dating ( Labrecque et al., 2011 ), the literature conclusively suggests that individuals are more likely to engage in personal branding when they perceive a career-related benefit; those who are motivated by advancing own career are more likely to use personal branding as a career tool. Gregor and O’Brien (2016) suggested achievement, leadership, and educational factors of career aspiration, but, given the diversity of career experiences where individuals may apply personal branding, we focused only on career achievement aspiration.

Second, the subjective norm refers to the social pressure on the individuals to progress in their careers. Getting improvement feedback is known to lead to a variety of positive career outcomes, such as job performance, organizational citizenship behaviors, ( Whitaker and Levy, 2012 ), and job satisfaction ( Anseel and Lievens, 2007 ). Hence, getting feedback on how someone should go about positioning herself professionally should increase the intention to engage in personal branding.

Third, perceived behavioral control, such as an individual’s beliefs about the ease or difficulty of performing a particular behavior, is theorized in our research as career self-efficacy ( Day and Allen, 2004 ). When an individual feels in charge of his/her own career and feels able to execute the desired career behaviors well, the likelihood of engaging in personal branding increases. Ajzen (1991) posited that “perceived behavioral control, together with behavioral intention, can be used directly to predict behavioral achievement” (p. 184). This makes us conclude that career self-efficacy combined with the intention to engage in personal branding will lead to doing so, and career self-efficacy will also have a direct effect on personal branding.

While thinking about doing something is not the same as the action itself, Ajzen and Fishbein (1980) asserted that the best predictor of engaging in a behavior is the intention to do so. We, therefore, hypothesized that people would engage in personal branding if they have a strong intention to do so.

Hypothesis 2 : (a) career achievement aspiration, (b) career feedback, and (c) career self-efficacy are positively related to personal branding intention.

Hypothesis 3 : Career self-efficacy is positively related to personal branding.

Hypothesis 4 : Personal branding intention is positively related to personal branding.

Hypothesis 5 : Personal branding intention mediates the relationship between (a) career achievement aspiration, (b) career feedback, and (c) career self-efficacy, and personal branding.

The role of self-efficacy, proactive personality, personal initiative, and feedback seeking in driving proactive behaviors has been extensively discussed ( Crant, 2000 ). We hypothesized that similar concepts, such as those studied in this paper, would have the same mechanisms of action when applied to proactive career behaviors, such as personal branding. And, as established in Study 1, personal branding is strongly related to perceived employability. We, therefore, expected that its antecedents would have a positive indirect effect on perceived employability too.

Hypothesis 6 : Personal branding intention and then personal branding sequentially mediate the relationship between (a) career achievement aspiration, (b) career feedback, and (c) career self-efficacy and perceived employability.

Participants were recruited via the researchers’ networks, e.g., LinkedIn and WeChat, popular in China, and were encouraged to ask their colleagues to also participate using a standardized invitation about the project and a link to the anonymous survey. A total of 249 responses were collected. Similar to the Study 1 data cleansing strategy, after the visual and boxplot analyses, 35 responses were removed because of acquiescing responding or missing data in core variables, resulting in an analyzable sample of 214 cases, containing no missing data (female = 65.4%; Mean Age = 36.7 (SD = 11.40); China = 88.8%, the Netherlands = 6.5%, Germany = 1.9%; bachelor’s degree = 57.5%, master’s degree = 15.9%, high school = 11.2%, college = 10.3%, Ph.D. = 3.3%, secondary school = 1.9%; employed full-time = 75.7%, employed part-time = 5.1%, not employed, looking for work = 13.6%, not employed, not looking for work = 2.3%; a total of 38% had 5 years of work experience or less).

The survey items were translated into Mandarin Chinese following the back-translation procedure ( Sperber et al., 1994 ). The only exception was the career feedback scale, the original version of which was provided to us already in Chinese by the scale authors. Responses to all the statements in this study were provided on a five-point scale ranging from 1 ( strongly disagree ) to 5 ( strongly agree ).

We used the same 18 items as in Study 1 to assess personal branding. Chronbach’s alpha was 0.90. The alphas for the three factors of the scale (strategic, differentiated, and technologically savvy) were 0.82, 0.76, and 0.88, respectively. As we were interested in overall personal branding behavior rather than its subfactors, we chose to stay at the higher scale level.

Personal branding intention was measured with two modified items similar to the ones used in a study of pro-environmental behavior based on the TPB ( de Leeuw et al., 2015 ). The items “I am determined to engage in personal branding behaviors on a regular basis” and “I have the will to engage in personal branding behaviors on a regular basis” were sufficiently highly correlated to demonstrate the stability of this scale ( r = 0.82, p < 0.001). We provided the definition of personal branding, used in this paper, to the respondents before they answered these questions.

Perceived Employability

We employed the same five-item scale to assess perceived employability. Cronbach’s alpha was 0.89.

Career achievement aspiration was measured with a six-item scale developed by Kim et al. (2016) for their studies of college women in Korea. As they voiced concerns around using reverse-scored items in studies in intercultural context, we chose to follow their advice to use a shorter scale vs. the original eight-item scale ( Gregor and O’Brien, 2016 ) as it demonstrated good reliability and validity in that Korean study. An example item was “I plan to obtain many promotions in my organization or business.” Cronbach’s alpha was 0.87.

Career feedback was measured with the four-item career improvement subscale of the career goal feedback scale ( Hu et al., 2017 ). A distinguishing feature of this scale was that the items were negatively worded, and hence were reverse scored for the analysis. An example item was “I do not get helpful advice from others about how I can reach my career goals.” Cronbach’s alpha was 0.91.

Career self-efficacy was measured by the seven-item scale developed by Dobrow and Higgins (2005) . An example item is “I believe that I can do what I need to do in order to make my career successful.” Cronbach’s alpha was 0.92.

The model in Figure 1 was tested in two steps, similar to the strategy of analysis employed in Study 1. There were differences in how we executed Step 2. We performed the SEM analysis on a partial disaggregation model ( Bagozzi and Edwards, 1998 ) by creating parcels of items theoretically related to each other as suggested by Little et al. (2013) . A large number of items can cause parameter instability related to the possibility of multiple solutions, cross-loadings, and correlated residuals, especially in a small sample such as ours ( Little et al., 2002 ). Parceling results in more stable model solutions, improves the variable-to-sample ratio, remedies small sample sizes, decreases the likelihood of correlated residuals and dual factor loadings, and reduces Type I errors in the item correlations ( Bagozzi and Edwards, 1998 ; Little et al., 2013 ). To estimate the indirect effects and mitigate the impact of multivariate non-normality of the data, we used the same bootstrapping procedures as in Study 1.

In order to test the factor structure of our model, we tested several measurement models with the parcels tapping the six latent variables (career achievement aspiration, career feedback, career self-efficacy, personal branding intention, personal branding, and perceived employability). Since some of the alternative models had comparable fit indices and degrees of freedom, we employed Akaike’s information criterion (AIC) index for the proposed and alternative models ( Bozdogan, 1987 ). The AIC is useful for model comparison as it favors the more parsimonious models, while providing no information on the fit of a particular model. In general, the model with the lowest AIC is considered to have the best fit. As shown in Table 4 , the measurement model with six latent factors showed the best fit to the data and was therefore chosen for further analyses. All the items had significant loadings on the intended factors (range λ = 0.64–0.94, p ’s < 0.001).

Goodness of fit and comparative indices of the proposed and alternative measurement models (Study 2).

χ 2 values are at p < 0.001; RMSEA values are at p close < 0.001 except * p close = 0.007. All the chi-square differences against the baseline six-factor model are significant at p < 0.001 .

Table 5 presents the variables’ means, standard deviations (SD), correlations, and reliability measures of the scales. Personal branding, as expected, was highly and significantly correlated with other career-related constructs: perceived employability ( r = 0.60, p < 0.001), career achievement aspiration ( r = 0.57, p < 0.001), and career self-efficacy ( r = 0.56, p < 0.001).

Study 2 variables’ means ( M ), standard deviations (SD), and correlations.

N = 214. The Cronbach’s alphas are displayed in bold on the diagonal .

To identify the best model for the analyses, we compared the fit of several theoretically plausible models. Model 1 tested the originally hypothesized relationships as depicted in Figure 2 . In Model 2, we tested the full mediation model between career self-efficacy and personal branding. In Model 3, we added direct paths from all the antecedents to personal branding. In Model 4, we removed a direct path in between career feedback and personal branding. In Model 5, we tested full mediation between all the antecedent variables and personal branding. As we see from the results of the models testing shown in Table 6 , Model 3 demonstrated both the lowest AIC and better fit indices across the baseline and the alternative models tested, and it was significantly different from the baseline model (Δ χ 2 = 19.24, df = 2, p < 0.001). Hence, we proceeded with testing the model represented in Figure 2 .

Goodness of fit and comparative indices of the proposed and alternative models (Study 2).

RMSEA values are at p close < 0.001. All the chi-square differences among the four models are significant at p < 0.001, except for the difference between Models 3 and 4 (Δχ 2 = 3.17, df = 1, p = 0.07) .

Maximum likelihood estimates for the personal branding model. Solid lines indicate significant paths; dashed lines indicate non-significant paths. Standardized beta weights are reported. N = 214. *** p < 0.001.

The hypothesized structural model did explain variance in personal branding intention ( R 2 = 48.4%), in personal branding ( R 2 = 88.1%), and in perceived employability ( R 2 = 76.8%). Career achievement aspiration was positively related to personal branding intention ( γ = 0.58, p < 0.001), career feedback was negatively related ( γ = −0.28, p < 0.001), and the relationship between career self-efficacy and personal branding intention was not significant ( γ = 0.04, p = 0.69). Therefore, Hypothesis 2a was supported, while 2b and 2c were not. Career self-efficacy was positively related to personal branding ( γ = 0.30, p < 0.001), supporting Hypothesis 3. The analyses provided support to Hypothesis 4 that personal branding intention is positively related to personal branding ( β = 0.32, p < 0.001). Testing the mediating effects of personal branding intention, we found that career achievement aspiration had a significant indirect effect on personal branding [ indirect effect = 0.11, 95% CI (0.11; 0.44)]. The indirect effect of career feedback was significant but negligible [ indirect effect = −0.04, 95% CI (−0.08; −0.01)], and that of career self-efficacy was not significant [ indirect effect = 0.01, 95% CI (−0.05; 0.06)]. Thus, Hypotheses 5a and 5b were supported, while Hypothesis 5c was not. Estimating the effects of sequential mediation between the antecedents and perceived employability, we found that career achievement aspiration indirectly positively influenced perceived employability via personal branding intention and personal branding [ indirect effect = 0.16, 95% CI (0.08; 0.27)], while career feedback had a negligible negative effect [ indirect effect = −0.06, 95% CI (−0.11; −0.02)] and career self-efficacy had a non-significant effect [ indirect effect = 0.01, 95% CI (−0.07; 0.08)]. These results supported Hypothesis 6a and did not support Hypotheses 6b and 6c.

Additionally, we estimated the indirect effects of career achievement aspiration and career self-efficacy on perceived employability via personal branding. The results indicated significant positive relationships: indirect effect = 0.36, 95% CI (0.15; 0.63) and indirect effect = 0.30, 95% CI (0.04; 0.46), respectively.

The purpose of Study 2 was to examine the antecedents of personal branding. Career achievement aspiration was the strongest predictor of the personal branding intention. Thus, the attitudinal disposition, as explained by the TPB, was the leading indicator for the personal branding behavior. Career achievement aspiration was also strongly related to personal branding, eventually leading to greater perceived employability, confirming the importance of attitudinal disposition for proactive career behavior.

We observed that the societal norm around personal branding has not been settled yet, especially outside the Western contexts ( Phua and Caras, 2008 ; Saleem and Iglesias, 2015 ), which could explain the negative relationship between career feedback and personal branding intention. Those who receive a lot of career advice (and, therefore, enjoy career help from own network) may have a lower need to engage in personal branding. Our results were consistent with previous studies: a negative relationship was found between feedback on improvement needed and career exploration ( Hu et al., 2018 ), and a positive relationship was found between negative career feedback and career goal disengagement and lowering career goals ( Hu et al., 2019 ). Additionally, we can suppose that people receive and act upon career feedback from more experienced contacts who were likely to become successful in the traditional career models. Therefore, it is plausible to suppose that personal branding is not career advice that people get, and since ignoring the advisors’ recommendations carries relational penalties for the seekers ( Blunden et al., 2019 ), they do not engage in personal branding as an action competing for time and resources to whatever other advice is received.

Lastly, personal branding is still an emerging career competence ( Gorbatov et al., 2018 ) requiring specific competencies, such as technological, metacognitive, creative, and critical skills ( Lorgnier and O’Rourke, 2011 ). Yet, career success still can be achieved via traditional mechanisms, especially within organizations ( McDonald and Hite, 2005 ). This could explain the non-significant relationship between career self-efficacy and the personal branding intention (it was measured with two items specifically asking about the intent to perform personal branding activities). However, given significant indirect effect of career self-efficacy on perceived employability through personal branding, we can conclude that people do engage in personal branding but may not call it by that term.

General Discussion

To better understand predictors and outcomes of personal branding, we conducted two studies, drawing on the contemporary career theory ( Arthur, 2008 ), proactive behavior literature ( Crant, 2000 ; Seibert et al., 2001a ), and the TPB ( Ajzen, 1991 ). The studies tested the antecedents and outcomes of personal branding, providing quantitative evidence for its important role for individual career success in the context of contemporary work environment.

Theoretical Implications

With this paper, we attempted to expand our collective knowledge of proactive career behaviors, such as personal branding, in the context of contemporary work relations. As the notion of career success changes to be seen as a dynamic, context-dependent social construction ( Dries et al., 2008 ), we tried to address the need to examine the relationship between the contemporary view of career success and personal branding that has become “a prominent feature of the labor market, whether in face-to-face settings or in online platforms” ( Vallas and Christin, 2018 , p. 12). We were inspired by prior research to do so: Roberts (2005) indicated that further research was needed on the “bottom-up tactics” in today’s work environment, Wang and Wanberg (2017) specifically called for more empirical studies of the consequences of engaging in the “gig economy,” while Sullivan and Baruch (2009) urged to extend the career research beyond the Western context.

We also hoped to advance the career theory by examining the ontology of the relationships between personal branding and other career phenomena. In application of the TPB, we focused on the individual drivers leading to personal branding. Earlier research identified other attitudinal antecedents for constructing a positive personal reputation, such as desire for rewards or need to belong ( Zinko and Rubin, 2015 ). Our findings that the attitudinal predisposition, namely career achievement aspiration, was the principal antecedent to personal branding in our study adds to the understanding of why people engage in personal branding. In both studies, personal branding was positively related to perceived employability and career satisfaction, both of which are measures of career success ( Boudreau et al., 2001 ; Arthur et al., 2005 ; Ng et al., 2005 ; Greenhaus et al., 2008 ).

Finally, by providing a generic, reliable, and valid scale to measure personal branding we hope to encourage other scholars in the field to partake in personal branding research. Given the changes in the way people work today that we mentioned in the introduction, more quantitative research is needed to understand how workers and job seekers construct, package, and present their work identities to the target audiences.

Limitations and Future Research Directions

Like most research, this study had several limitations. First, although the mediation effects found in Study 1 were in line with the extant research (e.g., Dacre Pool and Qualter, 2013 ), the data in both studies were cross-sectional, thus precluding us from claiming causal inferences and being more susceptible to common method bias. All our three samples relied on the same methodology: self-report surveys. We did our best to mitigate this limitation by conducting the studies in different cultural settings and testing alternative models, which showed a worse fit than the mediation models. Further longitudinal and experimental research is needed to examine the causal nature of the personal branding-career satisfaction relationship, while at the same time accounting for the common method bias. Adding alternative sources of data, such as supervisor assessment or recruiter evaluation, will provide valuable insights on the effectiveness of personal branding.

A second limitation of our study was that the organizational context was out of its scope. Gorbatov et al. (2018) provided a list of work fields ranging from most to least conducive to personal branding, signaling that such activities may develop differently in diverse industry and firm settings. The professional role should also be accounted for, as, for example, freelance workers are more likely to engage in personal branding activities ( Gandini, 2016 ). The context in which certain behaviors take place typically serves as a moderator (see, e.g., Sully De Luque and Sommer, 2000 ) or a mediator (see, e.g., Liden et al., 2014 ). Therefore, it is highly advisable that future research explore such moderating and/or mediating effects of the context, in which personal branding occurs.

A third limitation was that we explored only the positive consequences of personal branding for individual career seekers. However, several authors highlighted the “dark side” of personal branding, such as personal branding failures ( Labrecque et al., 2011 ), duress associated with the pervasive pressure to engage in personal branding ( Vallas and Cummins, 2015 ; Vallas and Christin, 2018 ), pushing the ethical boundaries of the professional field ( Cederberg, 2017 ), commodification of reflexivity ( Wee and Brooks, 2010 ), losing personal identity ( Holton and Molyneux, 2017 ), or, refusing to do so, failing to fit the organization sufficiently to produce a meaningful impact ( Shepherd, 2005 ; Sturdy and Wright, 2008 ). Future studies should investigate the deleterious impacts of personal branding for individuals, teams, and organizations.

Practical Implications

Since personal branding, as a contemporary career behavior, in both studies demonstrated strong relationships with career success, workers, job seekers, and employers, labor market intermediaries should invest in understanding what it means to them. For individuals, there is sufficient evidence that personal branding leads to a variety of beneficial outcomes, such as enhanced credibility, visibility, prestige, promotions, or monetary rewards ( Gorbatov et al., 2018 ). Whether organizations benefit from having employees actively engaging in personal branding is still a matter for further research. For students, personal branding could help in the university-to-work transition by contributing to their career identity ( Santisi et al., 2018 ). Finally, the personal branding scale could be a useful diagnostic instrument in a diversity of contexts, such as in training courses aimed to help the participants obtain a deeper insight into career decision-making.

Data Availability Statement

Ethics statement.

Ethical review and approval was not required for the study on human participants in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. Written informed consent from the participants was not required to participate in this study in accordance with the national legislation and the institutional requirements.

Author Contributions

SG is a Ph.D. candidate, who is the main author of the submitted paper. SK and EL are Ph.D. supervisors who helped SG design the studies. SG did the initial analysis of the literature, was responsible for all the data collection and analysis, and wrote the initial draft. In the consequent process, SK and EL helped to develop the paper toward the final submission.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Beau Scherpenzeel and Shiyao Tong for assisting with the data collection for the two studies reported in this paper.

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You are a brand: social media managers’ personal branding and “the future audience”

Journal of Product & Brand Management

ISSN : 1061-0421

Article publication date: 3 July 2020

Issue publication date: 5 September 2020

Social media management is an emerging profession that is growing as companies increasingly adopt social media. The purpose of this paper is to analyze social media managers’ personal branding.

Design/methodology/approach

In-depth qualitative data is drawn from 20 semi-structured interviews with social media managers and supported by three years of orienting fieldwork in Toronto, Canada.

Social media managers are responsible for managing and executing organizations’ brands and presence on social media and digital platforms. As lead users of social media, social media managers provide critical insight into the emerging practices of personal branding on social media. “The future audience” is introduced to describe how individuals project a curated brand for all future unknown and unanticipated audiences, which emphasizes a professional identity. Due to workplace uncertainty, social media managers embody the mentality of being “always-on-the-job-market”, which is a driver for personal branding in their attempt to gain or maintain employment.

Originality/value

While personal branding is largely discussed by industry professionals, there is a need for empirical research on personal branding that examines how various employee groups experience personal branding. This research fills this gap by analyzing how people working in social media brand their identity and how their personal branding is used to market themselves to gain and maintain employment. The development of “the future audience” and “always-on-the-job-market” can be used to understand other professions and experiences of personal branding.

• Social media
• Personal branding
• Future audience
• Self-branding
• Social media managers
• Social media management

Jacobson, J. (2020), "You are a brand: social media managers’ personal branding and “the future audience”", Journal of Product & Brand Management , Vol. 29 No. 6, pp. 715-727. https://doi.org/10.1108/JPBM-03-2019-2299

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2020, Jenna Jacobson.

Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and author. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode

1. Introduction

Everyone is individually branded: one may not realize, acknowledge, embrace or manage their brand, but it certainly exists. In North America and in various industrialized countries, the importance of the personal brand has emerged as a recurring topic in popular discourse and academia during the past ten years, under the titles of personal branding (Gehl, 2011; Wee and Brooks, 2010 ), human branding ( Close et al. , 2011 ; Moulard et al. , 2015 ), personal marketing ( Kotler et al. , 2005 ), self-branding ( Hearn, 2008 ; Marwick, 2013 , p. 2012) and self-marketing ( Shepherd, 2005 ). In this research, personal branding is defined as the process of developing, harnessing and classifying personal information and providing a comprehensive narrative for others to easily understand one’s identity—often using social media.

Social media managers are at the forefront of personal branding and offer a unique perspective to understand the personal branding strategies that they are personally experiencing and professionally witnessing on social media. Considering that these social media professionals engage with their target community and customers using social media, they exist at the intersection of social media users, social media consumers, social media professionals and social media influencers. Social media managers experience the pressures of social media first-hand, and they are also part of a newly emerging profession based on social media.

The research focuses on the personal branding of social media managers as a professional practice by linking the issues of personal branding with the emergence of a new profession: social media management. Social media managers are responsible for managing and executing organizations’ brands and presence on various social media and digital platforms. Social media managers are acutely aware of the necessity of personal branding for career success ( Shade and Jacobson, 2015 ). They develop and execute this social strategy at the digital frontline; they are digital creators and producers who are heavily engaged with social media management and personify the digitally savvy individuals leading social media trends. As lead users of social media, social media managers provide critical insight into the emerging practices of personal branding on social media.

While personal branding is largely discussed by industry professionals, there is a need for empirical research on personal branding that examines how various professions experience personal branding. This research seeks to fill this gap by analyzing how people working in social media brand their own identity and how personal branding is used to market themselves to gain and maintain employment. Specifically, how do social media managers build their personal brand? To address this, the research analyzes social media managers’ practices of personal branding and the presentation of self on social media.

The research analyzes how social media managers work in social media—referring to the work practice of social media management—and also do the work of social media—referring to the execution of their personal brand using social media—to leverage a strategic advantage in the job market. Using a qualitative mixed method approach, including three years of orienting fieldwork in Toronto, Canada, and 20 semi-structured interviews with social media managers, “the future audience” is introduced to describe how individuals project their personal brand for all future and unknown audiences on social media. The research describes the prevailing strategy of creating and crafting a curated personal brand, which necessitates continuous labour of presenting a curated identity. Finally, the research identifies the “always-on-the-job-market” mentality due to the latent precarity and repeated “hustle” to survive in an unstable labour market. Section 2 outlines previous scholarly literature on personal branding and social media management.

2. Literature review

2.1 personal branding.

The concept of “personal positioning” has gained popularity since Ries and Trout introduced the idea in 1981. They use personal positioning to refer to the clothes one wears, what one does and the words one uses, but the authors did not expand the term. More than three decades later, personal branding experts in industry are presenting the same arguments with renewed force and a focus on social media as the locus of personal branding ( Broad, 2016 ; Marcoux, 2016 ).

In the scholarly literature, there is immense overlap in the use of the terms “human brand” and “personal brand”, as the terms are often used interchangeably. In a systematic review, Gorbatov et al. (2018) contend that, with over 100 published papers on personal branding, the scholarly area is fragmented with multiple diverging definitions and imprecise conceptual boundaries with human branding being a closely related concept to personal branding. The human brand has previously referred to “any well-known persona who is the subject of marketing communications effort” (Thomson, 2006, p. 104); however, Close et al. (2011) embrace a more inclusive definition as a persona that is well known or emerging. As a point of differentiation, the human brand is sometimes used to refer to traditional celebrities (such as famous athletes or musicians), whereas personal brand may be used to describe those who are more micro-celebrities ( Khamis et al. , 2017 ; Senft , 2008, 2013 ) or those more amateur on social media ( Chen, 2013 ). As such, in this paper, the term personal branding is adopted throughout.

Personal branding has evolved, which can be attributed to the proliferation of computer-mediated communication and the rise of social media that have afforded people the ability to use the internet to create and foster self-presentations ( Albright and Simmens, 2014 ). Today, personal branding relies on a combination of the presentation of self offline and the presentation of self online. Therefore, personal branding is not the same as the presentation of self that existed offline; however, personal branding is also not completely new and different. Self-presentation is an important driver of brand-related electronic word-of-mouth ( Pasternak et al. , 2017 ). The technology itself does not necessitate change; rather, social media has afforded a new arena for identity creation, performance and management.

Personal branding refers to the process an individual uses to develop and market themselves to others. Personal branding is an act of agency as an individual actively—consciously or subconsciously—performs an identity. Using social media, the information is amalgamated and presented in an information exchange system whereby identity is created and consumed by online audiences. Computer-mediated communication affords individuals the ability to create and present a more positive representation of themselves than is possible with face-to-face communication ( Toma and Hancock, 2011 ). An individual can be selective in their self-presentation techniques ( Rosenberg and Egbert, 2011 ) and in that selection process can present themselves in positive ways ( Bazarova and Choi, 2014 ; Chou and Edge, 2012 ).

Until recently, industry professionals have largely monopolized the conversation on personal branding by writing popular books on how to develop a brand, which is largely tied to career success; for example, Broad’s (2016) The New Brand You: Your New Image Makes the Sale for You ; Marcouz’s (2016) Be The Brand: The Ultimate Guide to Building Your Personal Brand ; and Chritton’s (2014) Personal Branding for Dummies . The vast majority of the personal branding strategies are targeted at professionals who wish to develop a desirable identity, but the practices have moved down the employee hierarchies to also include young people seeking to position themselves for entry-level employment.

In 2005, Shepherd stated, “The self marketing territory is currently occupied by a mix of self-help gurus, job recruitment specialists and career advisors, and practical approaches and job-related advice predominate” (p. 592). Since the time of Shepherd’s writing, the topic has become more prevalent in scholarly research. Emerging scholarly research on personal branding has analyzed the branding practices of various professions such as chefs ( Dion and Arnould, 2016 ), faculty ( Close et al. , 2011 ), freelance professionals ( Gandini, 2015 ), artists ( Moulard et al. , 2015 ), fashion models ( Parmentier et al. , 2013 ) and fashion bloggers ( Duffy and Hund, 2015 ). Previous research has found that fashion models engage in the branding strategy of standing out while also fitting in ( Parmentier et al. , 2013 ); fashion bloggers portray the post-feminist ideal of “having it all” by performing passionate work and showcasing a glamourous life ( Duffy and Hund, 2015 ); chefs embody two possible models of brand management including a distributed or fragmented brand and a unified personification of the brand ( Dion and Arnould, 2016 ); research productivity is the strongest brand cue for new faculty that influences academic placement ( Close et al. , 2011 ); the practice of self-branding for freelance professionals is an investment for the return of social capital ( Gandini, 2015 ); and for artists, their authenticity is the most impactful factor of their brand that influences consumers’ perceptions and behavioural intentions ( Moulard et al. , 2015 ). Recognizing the professional practices of different professions is important to understanding the emerging work practices.

Prior research has consistently pointed to the role and performance of authenticity in achieving a credible brand ( Djafarova and Trofimenko, 2018 ; Kowalczyk and Pounders, 2016 ; Moulard et al. , 2014 , 2015 ). Discussions surrounding personal branding largely explore the strategies and, to a lesser extent, the effects of personal branding on society—such as Hearn (2008) and Banet-Weiser’s (2012) critical response to personal branding. Similarly, Murthy (2012) argues that in an age of “instant publicity”, rather than advertising products, we are advertising ourselves, and an extension to this argument is that we are the product. Unlike prior research that tends to focus on personal brands in established organizational fields ( Parmentier et al. , 2013 ), this research focusses on an emerging industry: social media management.

2.2 Social media management

Social media management is growing as a field and as an emerging profession, yet, to date, there is little research that examines social media management as an occupation. Shepherd and Shtern interviewed digital strategists to understand how the workers conceptualize their work as “cultural intermediaries” in the digital media economy ( Kruse et al. , 2016 ). Montalvo (2011) identifies the skills necessary for a social media manager. Silva Robles (2017) analyzed the job ads of a Spanish Association of Online Community Managers and Social Media Professionals and identifies that the main responsibility of community management is to update social media content. Tørning et al. (2015) interviewed social media managers in Denmark to identify the challenges of organizing social media and perceptions on the return on investment of various social media activities. Based on an analysis of Australian job postings and interviews with social strategists, McCosker (2017) identifies that social strategists work in-house for various organizations and that social media work is diffused across industries. Kwon et al. (2013) surveyed 400 students at a business school in the USA to gauge what qualifications were expected of a social media coordinator and argue that universities need to prepare students for jobs in social media. More recently, Kanuri et al. (2018) interviewed social media professionals to identify the optimal scheduling of posting to social media, and Bossio et al. (2020) analyze the contexts of social media work and identify how social media managers are “boundary setters”.

While previous research tends to identify a specific sector or the managerial perspective on an emerging profession and has implications for how effectively social media managers perform their job, there is a gap between understanding the professional identities and personal branding practices of social media managers. Social media managers represent an important occupational group in the digital economy that has received limited scholarly attention. Gill (2002) reflects on her research on web designers and states, “Indeed, despite the importance of new media workers for arguments about the transformation of the economy and the future of work, there have been very few studies which have actually examined new media workers’ lives” (p. 75). Similarly, Deuze (2011) argues, “Scholarship on the production side of media industries is relatively scarce” (p. x). While studies of new media workers previously received little attention in academic scholarship, there is a renewed focus on new media workers, particularly in the cultural and creative industries (for instance, the EU collaborative research project, Dynamics of Virtual Work, 2020 ). Research on various forms of new media workers – freelance journalists ( Cohen, 2016 ), web designers ( Kennedy, 2012 ), women’s magazine producers ( Duffy, 2013 ), tech workers in San Francisco ( Marwick, 2013 ) and unpaid interns ( de Peuter et al. , 2015 ; Jacobson and Shade, 2018 )—is critically important in understanding the shifts in work practices. By specifically focussing on social media managers as digital creators, this research responds to Gill’s plea to study new media workers and contributes to the developing research agenda on personal branding.

3. Theoretical framework

Personal branding is largely about self-presentation and impression management ( Gergen , 1991, 2009 ; Goffman, 1959 ; Papacharissi, 2011 ; Robinson, 2007 ). Symbolic interactionism is used as a theoretical lens to understand social media managers’ presentation of self on social media. While the sociology of professions has its roots in functionalism, the symbolic interactionist approach rejects functionalism and instead sees professional titles and positions as constructed (Nolin, 2008). Given the focus on social media managers’ self-perceived identities and the practices of personal branding in relation to others, as it pertains to their work practices, symbolic interactionism is used as an appropriate theoretical lens.

Symbolic interactionism asserts that the concept of self is created in the interactions with others. The social interactionist perspective has its sociological roots in Mead’s work that claims, “Our sense of self is really our perception of society’s evaluation of us” ( Robinson, 2007 , p. 95). Symbolic interactionism has also been adopted as a contemporary theory to study the sociology of work: Abbott (1988) theorizes how to understand the evolution of professions; Beck (2000) decries the “end of the work society” with the decrease in full-time secure employment; Hodson and Sullivan (2011) analyze the high-tech workplace; Sennett (1998) explores work and identity based on how employees develop narratives to find meaning in their working lives; Huffman and Torres (2002) describe how work is gendered and socially and arbitrarily constructed; Marwick and boyd (2010) use symbolic interactionism to understand the collapsed audience and the imagined audience on Twitter; and Hochschild (2003) embraces Goffman’s performativity theory and Marxist theory of alienation to understand “emotional labor”. Goffman is one of the leading proponents of symbolic interactionism, and this research embraces Goffman’s presentation of self as a theoretical lens and extends the theorization to understand social media managers’ personal branding on social media.

Identity is related to the creation of who we think we are and the subsequent presentation of the self to others. At the most basic level, Seidman (2002) suggests, “Identities refer to the way we think of ourselves and the self-image we publicly project” (p. 9). Social actors engage in a performance where identity is negotiated and developed, which Goffman (1959) calls impression management. Goffman’s dramaturgical model suggests all actions are socially performed with the purpose of the audience developing and maintaining a positive impression of the actor. Individuals actively and purposely engage in strategic actions, which allow them to construct and preserve positive impressions that encourage the audience to see them in favourable ways.

Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical model serves as a theoretical lens to study online impression management ( Hochschild, 2003 ; Hogan and Quan Haase, 2010 ; Labrecque et al. , 2011 ). Goffman (1959) suggests that there are two regions of a performance: the front stage and the back stage. The front stage is “that part of the individual’s performance which regularly functions in a general and fixed fashion to define the situation for those who observe the performance” (p. 22). The front stage is where the performance takes place before an audience. In the backstage, a person can perform activities that would undermine the integrity of the front stage and their impression management.

Goffman (1959) describes how people foster specific impressions in other people’s minds through information management by analyzing the impression given (signs that are intentional) and given off (the unconscious or non-deliberate signs). In every interaction, information is presented and absorbed, and it is through this process that the self is actually created; there is no “real” self, but rather a multiplicity of selves. While Goffman (1959) specifically states that he is only dealing with face-to-face interaction, his theorization has proven useful to understand computer-mediated communication and online identity ( Gergen, 2009 ; Hogan, 2010 ; Hogan and Quan Haase, 2010 ; Marwick and Boyd, 2011; Mendelson and Papacharissi, 2011 ; Pooley, 2010 ; Thumim, 2012 ) and is extended in this paper to understand social media managers’ personal branding.

4. Research approach

The in-depth qualitative research involved primary data collection from three years of fieldwork in Toronto, Canada, and semi-structured interviews. The three years of orienting fieldwork and participant observation, included attendance at technology meet-ups, networking events, industry conferences, girls in tech events, influencer events, company parties and product launches in Toronto. The fieldwork added context that informed the development of the interview guide. Rather than an artificial setting such as a laboratory or interview, participant observation refers to “the study of people in their own time and space, in their own everyday lives” ( Burawoy et al. , 1991 , p. 2). The internal validity and reliability of this research is supported by the fieldwork, which provided strong support for the research findings that emerged from the interviews (Schofield, 2002; Pryvor and Grossbart, 2005).

The 20 semi-structured interviews, forming the core data set used for the research, comprised 14 women and 6 men. The research received approval from the Research Ethics Board at a Canadian university. The research sought relevance rather than representativeness, which is typical in qualitative inquiry ( Renton and Simmonds, 2017 ; Teddlie and Yu, 2007 ). Women are over-represented in the sample, which is indicative and representative of the gender-divide of social media management more broadly. It is widely recognized and apparent that women dominate much of the work in social media. A 2017 report found that between 70% and 80% of social media workers on Payscale (a salary comparison website) were women ( Duffy and Schwartz, 2018 ). Other research in this area has similarly embraced a women-dominated sample to reflect the population, for example, Duffy (2015) focused exclusively on women in a study of social media producers.

A diverse group of social media managers was selected to reflect varied gender, ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds ( Table 1 ). Guided by the theoretical framework, the qualitative interview guide included a combination of open-ended and closed-ended questions. The open-ended questions allowed for a more nuanced understanding of the unique experiences and personal branding practices of social media managers, while the closed-ended questions captured demographic information in an attempt to gain a balanced perspective of the current industry. Interviews were on average 60 min and were conducted in participants’ workplaces, when possible, to provide insight into the working practices of participants and to contextualize the interview data. A qualitative research design is embraced because this form of work is nascent and quantitative methods may not have uncovered the in-depth information required to understand this emerging area.

The interviews were professionally transcribed, which resulted in 546 pages of single-spaced transcribed data from the interviews, and double-checked for quality and accuracy. The qualitative software package, NVivo, was used to organize, analyze and code the data. The data was iteratively coded and involved identifying emerging themes in the data ( Charmaz, 2006 ). The preliminary codes were those that repeatedly emerged in the interviews. Following the preliminary coding, codes were grouped together using thematic analysis in secondary coding in an iterative process. Aligned with other academic inductive qualitative research, the reliability of the coding is supported by repeated coding over time; moreover, the findings are further supported by the fieldwork and participant observation, which is commonly used in other academic mixed methods research ( Pryor and Grossbart, 2005 ; Charmaz, 2006 ). The findings and discussion are presented below. Direct quotations are used to highlight the findings and provide agency for participants to speak for themselves. All personal data and information has been anonymized.

Participants had an average of five years working in social media. The participants were largely educated with most participants having a bachelor’s degree. More than half of participants were between 25 and 30 years old, and participants’ income ranged from under $30,000 to over $100,000 with the median income of $60,000–$69,999 (CAD).

5. Findings and discussion

Social media managers use and internalize personal branding as an integral practice in their professional and personal lives. Participants reflected on their own personal branding practices, the impetus behind the need to personally brand oneself and the impact of their personal branding on their lives. Personal branding is used to position oneself in the labour market by promoting one’s skills, experience and personality—particularly when seeking employment. For social media managers, personal branding builds their reputation and is of critical importance; social media is not only their work, but also an important part of their professional portfolio that will follow them throughout their career. In the following sections, “the future audience” is introduced to describe how one’s personal brand is strategically curated and positioned as “always-on-the-job-market”.

5.1 Future audience

Beyond the current audience—both the actual and imagined audience—social media managers engage in personal branding to project a curated brand based on future unknown and unanticipated audiences. Scholars have theorized the imagined audience versus the actual audience on social media: the actual audience refers to those who actually view the content and the imagined audience is the creator’s mental conceptualization of who the audience is ( Litt, 2012 ). Building on Litt’s (2012) conceptualization of the imagined audience, this research argues that a third audience is important in understanding personal branding on social media: the future audience . The future audience describes how individuals project their personal brand for all future and unknown audiences on social media, which emphasizes the professional identity for future employers.

Social media managers repeatedly stated that the internet never forgets; public social media posts are archived indefinitely by the platforms and third-party data consumers, such as researchers, governments or organizations, and this shapes their personal branding strategy and what they deem acceptable to post. Ava explains why she stopped online brand-bashing (a public criticism of a brand typically using social media):

At the end of the day, you never know who you’re going to work for. You never know who you’re going to partner with. You never know where your next connection’s going to be. So if it’s very easily traceable that you were very aggressive towards a certain brand, I don’t think that looks good and you need to maintain your professionalism no matter where you work.

Ava explains how she not only filters herself online because of her current position, but also for any possible future position—her future audience. Her comments reflect the general sentiment amongst social media managers that they feel compelled to take ownership of their own brand through selective self-exposure for any and all future and unknown audiences. Beyond a general future audience, the emphasis is on the future professional audience of future employers.

Contrary to the offline “stage” as described by Goffman (1959) , on the online stage, the actor (or individual) is both the performer and the audience. The styled design of personal branding online comprises the “setting” of the performance ( Labrecque et al. , 2011 ). Importantly, an individual can visit their personal website, review their Twitter feed or use Facebook’s “View As” tool to see how their profile would appear to others. In this way, social media managers transcend their performance and attend to the performance as the actor, their imagined audience ( Litt, 2012 ), and the future audience simultaneously, which directly relates to their work practices.

Despite the term personal branding, the identity that participants foregrounded is one that is first-and-foremost professional . When giving advice for the next generation, Jill suggests, “Keep your social media professional so that when you get to the hiring stage, people will be impressed with what you’re sharing”. Jill’s comments reflect the consideration for the future audience, which is that of future employers. It is not merely a blurring of personal and professional (Gregg, 2011) but rather an intense overlapping and engulfing of the personal so that the personal becomes subsumed by the work personality; the professional identity becomes the personal identity.

Personal branding is perpetuated by the allure of future benefits – such as getting hired or upward mobility – but is also perpetuated by societal scare tactics. Social media managers described that to be effective, one needs to embrace personal branding as a pre-emptive strategy of impression management to avoid the presentation of information that would be destructive to their personal brand [ 1 ]. Personal branding strategies attempt to ensure that the individual is in control of information presented to the audience. Thus, their performance needs to be carefully maintained and worked on over time because the audience’s impressions can easily change. When developing a personal brand online, social media managers spoke of positioning themselves more prominently using social media to garner positive attention. The scare tactics – of losing control of one’s own brand and insistence that personal branding be continually worked upon—exist; however, these narratives neglect to recognize that positioning oneself more prominently in the public eye creates more opportunity for one’s performance to be discredited.

Horror stories of people posting something inappropriate and getting fired from their job have become commonplace. Participants used incidents such as these as reminders of what can occur from, even one, inappropriate moment on social media. Participants reflected that one’s personal social media activities can obliterate one’s career—whether one works in social media or other industries. Noah explains:

The idiocy of some people doesn’t ever really surprise me, but I actually think that’s changed more and that people do understand it more now, because you’re always hearing stories about somebody tweeted this and they got fired from their job – or something like that. People know and that’s why I think you get a lot of younger generations moving to something like Snapchat or they want to talk in more text that people aren’t tracking. [They] move a lot of their conversations to private Facebook messages rather than doing it on people’s walls because it’s sort of understood that “people can see this sh*t, so, I have got to find a way to do it where not as many people can see it”.

As a result of the context collapse (Marwick and Boyd, 2011), social media managers engage the “lowest common denominator approach” ( Hogan, 2010 ) to personal branding on social media by ensuring their posts are self-filtered to be acceptable to all audiences—which is extended to include the future audience. As Noah suggests, people can move their less desirable posts to more private social media platforms; however, it is difficult to segment audiences, even on private social media platforms. Kat explains the critical conundrum of how one’s “personal” social media accounts inevitably cross over into one’s professional life. Kat was in the process of moving jobs from working as an in-house social media manager to an agency and explains:

I haven’t started this job yet and the VP of the agency that I work for followed me on Instagram on Friday night. And I was in such a bad mood—I was staying with my parents, I went to visit them and I was like, “What in the hell, I haven’t even started. She’s the VP, she’s private, so, I don’t even know what the–like, do I follow her back? Because she’s private, is that crossing lines?” So, I didn’t follow her back, but now she can see everything I do, and I do not think that there is one thing on my Instagram that—I don’t post anything that I’m ashamed of. As the years go on, I feel like social media has expanded, so, for example, when I was at university: it’s peers, it’s university students, it’s Facebook. And now, my aunt, who is 60, has all three platforms and she follows me and follows my trips and whatever. So, in a way, I do censor myself, knowing that it’s not just my friends and my peers seeing stuff—it’s my 60-year-old aunt and now, which I hate—it’s the VP of my new company! So, while I still don’t post anything that I consider “out there”, it’s still like that little thing in the back that’s: “Oh, now your VP can see you on a Saturday night—let’s say—wearing a low-cut shirt”. I’m a bit prudish when it comes to stuff like that, and I just hate that. And people are like, “Well, then, why don’t you be private?” I’m like, “Yeah, even if I am private, she’s going to request to me, am I going to decline?” Of course not, you’re almost in that awkward [position]—at least professionally, I feel like it just keeps getting—social media just keeps getting looser and looser, and I’m in it, and I’m on it—so, I can’t really complain—but stuff like that drives me absolutely insane.

Kat explains that even with a private account, one’s social media accounts are never really private, which points to the work/life blurring that she experiences. As a result, she needs to work at molding herself into the right kind of subject. She describes that she is in social media and on social media, so the choice to have a private account simply does not exist for her. A (future) employer may send a request to friend or follow, and even if one’s account is private, it would be awkward to reject the request given the power differential and the emerging professional norms. While Kat is purposefully cautious about what she posts, she loathes the idea that her boss and colleagues follow her and there is nothing she can do about it except further filter her social media posts. Not only did her new boss seek her out on social media, she also sent a welcome email, which is a common practice, introducing her to the rest of the company: “Meet Kat. Here is all her experience in PR”. Kat continued, “It was a really nice email, but the last line was, ‘Feel free to follow her on social media,’ and I’m like ‘Oh my God!’” Three new colleagues that she had yet to meet followed her on social media, which she considered to cross the line in terms of etiquette. Social media managers’ social media accounts become professional accounts, which requires pre-emptively creating and presenting an appropriate personal brand that accounts for the future audience. Furthermore, this is a new form of labour discipline that ensures that an individual is a “good” work subject.

On public social media, people are always present to all audiences at the same time. Furthermore, with a public profile, it is often impossible to know the composition of the audience, as anyone could have access to the account. The simplistic intervention is electing not to use a public profile on social media, but this publicity is also a necessity in personal branding; however, there is a trend towards increased visibility across social media platforms for all current and future audiences.

5.2 Human brand as a curated brand

Curation emerged as a recurrent thematic to describe social media managers’ self-presentation practices on social media and the practices of personal branding for the future audience. Social media managers articulated that “curation” was the chief strategy in crafting a personal brand. Although social media is often dismissed as mere “fun” ( Angus et al. , 2010 ), the work of curation on social media is also about longer-term memory, digital archiving and cultural practices. Accordingly, the work of curation of a personal brand has a distinct purpose for the future audience. Personal branding is not merely a storytelling strategy; rather, curation serves as a lens to recognize the memory preservation that social media managers—including oneself, one’s current network and one’s future employers—can review in the future.

For social media managers, curation was naturalized and merely meant selecting what type of content would be used on social media and what type of content was excluded in crafting their personal brand. Amira explains how online influence is curated and developed over time and reinforces the link between influence and curation. Here, curation is purposeful and strategic. Kat explains, “You hear it a lot, ‘curate your personal brand’. Your personal brand is not your job, it’s how you reflect yourself online, it’s how you build yourself”. Christina similarly reflects on her approach to personal branding, “My strategy didn’t really change, it’s always been to present the curated version of me as a working-in-social-media girl living in Toronto”.

Curation traditionally referred to the work done by a curator. Curators have diverse roles within museums, but broadly speaking, the curator selects and collects the objects, interprets the pieces, writes the labels and conducts other tasks associated with the management and interpretation of the collection ( Curators Committee of the American Association of Museums, 2009 ). Digital curation refers to the long-term preservation of archiving digital objects (Abbott, 2008; Rusbridge et al. , 2005 ) and involves effective digital document preservation performed by experts or organizations. Beyond traditional curatorial practices, curation has been adopted by other disciplines: in anthropology, Bernardini (2008) explores the curation of knowledge in oral cultures of the Hopi villages; in medicine, Nahm et al. (2011) similarly use curation to refer to the technology of an open-source content management system for case report forms, which are used in clinical trials; in sociology, Hogan (2010) understands the algorithms designed by the site maintainers (the computer) to be the curator; in health, Crichton and Koch (2007) explore the curation of self-identity with dementia patients; in information studies, Williams et al. (2009) analyze how people curate their personal digital archives in relation to personal information management, and similarly, Whittaker (2011) uses the term “personal information curation” to describe the information lifecycle of information curation, and Jacobson (2012) uses information curation to describe an alternative information practice, which includes creativity, social networking and identity creation. More recently, Davis (2016) distinguishes between productive curation and consumptive curation to refer to how people curate the content they share on social media and the content they consume.

The use of social media extends beyond the seeking, using and sharing of information but is also implicated in social media managers’ identity creation. Social media managers engage in a strategic process that encourages the audience to develop a specific type of curated identity. Social media affords a generation of storytellers—a generation of people who create and share their stylized stories and lives with their networks. Social media managers are storytellers for brands and also storytellers about themselves through personal branding. Using the affordances of social media, it is readily accepted that there are some aspects about one’s life and work that are highlighted on social media—such as accomplishments—and other aspects that are largely left in the shadows—such as disappointments. Social media managers package themselves and sell themselves to employers, friends and the public through social media for both current and future audiences. They use curation as an “authentic” storytelling strategy of personal branding ( Banet-Weiser, 2012 ). In an attempt to counter claims of inauthenticity, participants spoke against “fake” content and in favour of curating their social media presence online in particular ways. Amira explains how she presents herself online:

Am I the same person offline and online? I think so. And people that I’m close [to] in the community management world are the people who are the same online and offline. You talk to them online then you meet them in person. When I first met you […] I met you at a conference, I checked you online, what’s your social media presence, and you’re the same person. I can tell. You are not like, “Hey look at me” – you’re like a real person. And I think that’s the same for me.

Amira’s comment about searching for a person online reflects the perceived disconnect between online and offline identities, which also valorizes the offline identity as that which is “real” and the online identity as that which is “unreal” or able to be faked. In recent years, there has been a backlash against personal branding on social media, which is premised on the representations being fake, inauthentic and narcissistic. Amira acknowledges that the curation of a personal brand can go too far if it is not an authentic representation of who you are. At the same time, she acknowledged that she strategically curates what she posts online, but this mirrors her offline behaviour as she recognizes that she also considers what she says offline. Mirroring Goffman’s (1959) online and offline stages, the use of “curation” in the articulation of personal branding strategies meant that participants recognized that not all aspects of their lives are shared. This is particularly important when considering the future audience, which is focused on future employers. Curation involves the selection of moments, images, videos or vignettes that showcase how they wish to be seen by others – now and in the future. In this way, curation involves a combination of aspirational and authentic representations whereby social media managers package themselves to their audiences.

While participants recognized curation as a creation strategy in personal branding, curatorial practice is also about longer-term memory and digital archiving. The practice of curation develops a culture that enables people to go back into the social media archive. This type of self-documenting offers insight into identity and the everyday lives of people, which is digitally archived. As a result, social media managers are curating a museum of the self for the future audience. Self-presentation is a process of curation whereby people take part in both sharing and archiving. Participants recognized that the data, as Riley says, “lives forever”. There is both the appeal of permanence and the fear of permanence. Sabrina comments on how she looks back on her past social media posts as it reveals who she was at a previous life stage:

It might seem ridiculous because it’s a five-year span, but five years into your 20s is figuring out your life—like you’re “in your 20s”. Sometimes I look back on Facebook memories—“thanks a lot”—because you really do look back on certain times of your life and [think] why? What was I?

At the same time, the utility of the social media archive elicits fear. Noah comments on how he is cognizant of the permanence and how this proactively impacts what he posts:

Well, wait a second, [do] I want to do this and it’s going to be super public and it’s going to be there forever and do I want this to be there forever? […] I think people think about it—even kids just saying stupid sh*t and then it’s like “yeah, you’re a kid, but this might come back to bite you in the ass one day”.

While the museum can be seen as a static and permanent representation of a time, a museum is also a living archive of the past ( Srinivasan et al. , 2010 ). An individual’s self-presentation is in a state of creation and evolution where there may never be a final product. Consequently, the exhibits grow and shrink as the individual progresses in an ever-evolving curation of the self. The affordances of social media generate both a tool for private and ephemeral communication and a tool to build and preserve an archive of the self. In this way, while social media is often considered to be fleeting and inconsequential, curation can be used to understand the strategic use of personal branding as a new form of personal archiving for the future audience.

Curation is a filter that not only provides a lens through which to see the world but also serves as a self-imposed sift of information. On social media, a “filter” is something that is added to an image to enhance the original. Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter and other social media platforms have built-in filters that can be added to images to create a desirable visual effect that enhances the images. Overall, a filter on social media is something that is added to the original. At the same time, a filter also refers to the removal—a filtering out. The filtering for personal branding requires an understanding of what is acceptable and desirable. However, an individual has little direct control over what information is online about themselves, which manifests in latent fear and the need to work on one’s personal brand. An individual can create additional sources of information (such as new social media profiles) which is something they perceive as having control over. The lack of control and the fear of undesirable information being showcased online result in social media managers feeling the need to continually work to create additional sites of self-presentation.

According to Marwick (2010) , “The edited self is the result of transparency, audience, intimacy, and authenticity motivating social media users to carefully construct ‘safe’ online profiles” (p. 437). Beyond “safe” profiles, powered by the affordances of social media, the curated self caters to the professional (work-related) future audience. For social media managers, the presentation of self on social media is not merely filtered or edited but curated in purposeful and calculated ways. The curated self extends from online to offline. Curation is used to construct, build and perform individualized identities across networks that bridge both online and offline experiences. Accordingly, curation is the work of personal branding that is often not visible. While the presentation of self is not new, the curation on social media for the future audience is value laden and ascribed significance in its manifestation.

In the digital economy where digital skills are increasingly required, using social media to showcase one’s personal brand also serves as a portfolio for future employers to highlight one’s digital literacy. Jill explains:

So you’re letting your personality shine through. You’re showing people how you curate content. You’re showing people what kind of filter you have. You’re showing people how you might reveal details about your personal life – that’s building a personal brand also.

As a result, participants explained that the personal curation of one’s brand serves as a reflection of one’s professionalism and digital literacy that future employers may use to assess potential job candidates.

5.3 Always-on-the-job-market

For social media managers, the future audience manifests in the pervasive sense of uncertainty, which resulted in them feeling and acting that they were always-on-the-job-market . Participants embodied an always-on-the-job-market mentality—even if currently employed. As related to personal branding, this manifested in the incessant need to cultivate and improve one’s personal brand for the future audience. The discourse of personal branding works to amplify anxieties about competing in a globalized labour market (Harold, 2013). This is further perpetuated by the fact that there are often no clear guidelines to success or promotion in social media management. Social media managers articulated that they needed to be entrepreneurial, which often means self-promotion and self-marketing. There is a popularized understanding that young people will move jobs many times in their career, and this trend is exacerbated by the uncertainty of social media managers’ work situation.

For social media managers, always-on-the-job-market manifests in continually showcasing their personal brand using social media, which requires constant effort and labour. Jill explains that she needs to work at her personal brand: “I do need to keep on working on growing it and keeping it fresh and relevant […] so that my latest post isn’t from a month ago”. To develop new content to feed her social media channels, she looks for opportunities to be invited to brand-sponsored events and also seeks out influencers in the city to interview for her blog. These interviews not only allow her to develop content for her blog in a strategy to improve her personal brand, those strategic connections to high-value people also serve to bolster her brand by affiliation. Jill admits that she hopes that the blogging, and the people she meets will one day help her to find a full-time position, as she was still tirelessly freelancing while looking for permanent work.

Effective personal branding for social media managers means continually working at presenting themselves in a way that allows them to be seen in a favourable way by others ( Wee and Brooks, 2010 ; Wilson and Blumenthal, 2008 ). The uncertainty of the job market necessitates perpetual labouring on oneself and on one’s personal brand. Personal branding needs persistent work to maintain the front stage by actively managing impressions through self-reflexivity, yet these ideals of personal branding problematically neglect the immense and perpetual work that is required of social media managers, expected by employers and normalized in society.

While personal branding is articulated as being particularly necessary for young people entering into the job market, personal branding has also become a necessity for people across various professions and throughout the job hierarchy. Although all interview participants were employed in some form, they still expressed a sense of hustling and proving their worth, alongside marketing themselves, which was evidenced in their personal branding. While participants reflected a sense of confidence and pride in their work, there was often an undertone of uncertainty with their work situation. This perception transformed into reality as many participants interviewed lost their job over the following year. Changing jobs, frequently with shorter gigs, is on the rise (Harris, 2014); however, this job hopping is often due to structural forces—such as downsizing, outsourcing and organizational consolidation—rather than individual choice. As a result, an impetus for personal branding lies in the precarious work situation where social media managers are always-on-the-job-market.

Personal branding is positioned in promotional discourse as the strategy to help someone stand out in a sea of job applicants and get a foot in the door. The narrative of “getting out there” or “getting yourself out there” or “getting your name out there” was repeated by the participants. Christina says she always advises people to build their personal brand. She explains, “I think it helps you be memorable. If you come into an interview and people haven’t heard of you before and you don’t stand out at all from the interview and there’s no way to remember you, you won’t be memorable”. Social media is a tool used to make the first impression even before a job applicant meets the interviewer and is used as a strategy to get the resume identified as potentially appealing; having a large following on social media is sometimes a requirement for getting hired for a social media job. Noah describes how using social media allowed him to break down barriers to communicate and meet with interesting people, including the heads of various companies. He purposefully sought out the leaders of large firms and responded to their tweets to get on their radar: “Would I have had the chance to interact with him previously, to get him to ask me to come in? Probably not. I would have gone through a traditional channel and sent my resume in and got lost in the f***ing pile somewhere”.

The impetus to unceasingly improve oneself manifests in learning new skills to be more marketable to employers. Noah describes his experience on the job market:

I’m always constantly trying to expose myself to new people, but when I was younger, I was looking for a job and I needed to get my name out there and make sure people knew who I was. Now, I have a job, and I feel like people do know who I am. I don’t mean to say that in a conceited-sounding way, but I’m not that person with a hundred Twitter followers or something anymore. People sort of know who I am: “I’m me. This is my brand”. The fact is my brand is my personality, so, it’s not something I work at anymore, it just happens.

Noah’s statement that “it just happens” speaks to the naturalization of the process and expectation of labouring on one’s personal brand as a contemporary worker. While building a personal brand is recognized as critical when applying for jobs in social media management, there exists a normalized continuous need to maintain the brand for the future audience. Even though Noah is well known as a social media manager, he is still very active on social media online and in the social media scene offline. The process of working on one’s personal brand becomes so ingrained for participants that it was no longer considered work; the practices are embedded into the everyday lived experiences of branding for social media managers.

The performance of a curated personal brand requires constant effort and labour and becomes an obligatory practice to gain and maintain employment. In this process, social media managers’ personal identity becomes subsumed by their professional personality, which constrains acceptable forms of subjectivity. Social media managers explain there is a perpetual need to do more, be more, share more and live more on social media to improve their personal brand. Living in a society of excess, which is not driven merely by consumerism or greed but by uncertainty, precarity and unpredictability, results in social media managers being always-on-the-job-market.

6. Conclusion

Social media managers’ personal branding practices highlight the broken binaries of labouring and living in a digitally mediated world, including the double labour of working on personal branding as an integral aspect of being an employee. The research analyzes the personal branding practices of social media managers and explores how social media is used as a tool of personal branding. Beyond the imagined and actual audience, the research finds that a third audience is important in understanding the impact of personal branding on social media: personal branding practices target the future audience , which includes unknown and unanticipated audiences. Social media managers curate their personal brand for future audiences, which is amplified given the sense of them being always-on-the-job-market.

Social media managers strive to develop curated positive impressions of the self through personal branding, and this is particularly relevant now in an age of social media where individual experiences are increasingly being lived out online and the presentation of self includes a combination of online and offline experiences. Owing to workplace uncertainty, social media managers embody the mentality of being always-on-the-job-market. This always-on-the-job-market mentality is a driver for personal branding as social media managers endeavour to gain or maintain employment. Other professions in the knowledge economy that face job insecurity, and other emerging professions, may experience similar branding practices. These personal branding practices may decrease or be perceived as less of a necessity if job insecurity decreased—such as if the profession were to become more formalized (perhaps by the establishment of official associations) or if the public recognition and employer perception of the value of the profession improved.

As a practical implication of the research, employers are tasked with supporting employees’ autonomy and recognizing the mental health risks of social media work. Employers should refrain from adding new hires on social media or publicly sharing their social media handles. Rather, employers should allow the employee to decide who they connect with, for example, employees at the same job level may elect to connect with one another as a way to build bonds and solidarity. Alternatively, employers can ask employees if they want to share any social media handle, which provides employees the opportunity to elect to share more “public” profiles (such as a public Twitter handle). While the onus lies with employers to set policies and practices, social media managers will need to develop personal and professional boundaries to ensure their well-being and long-term success in a fast-paced industry. Furthermore, in an attempt to reduce the mental health risks, employers can increase the size of their social media teams so that the responsibility of the work is distributed. Employers should endeavour to provide more long-term and stable employment contracts for employees to reduce the precarious nature of this type of work. The stability would lessen the burden of the perpetual curation.

With the emerging norm that employees will change jobs many times in their career—often out of necessity or force—coupled with the uncertainty of their work situation, comes an unstated reality that one is always-on-the-job-market. This is particularly relevant for emerging professions such as social media management, but this means social media managers need to tirelessly labour at improving their personal brand. While attention seeking is often presumed to be the goal of personal branding, attention seeking is not the end goal for social media managers. The always-on-the-job-market mentality embodied by employees points to how personal branding is required for employees to secure or continue to hold positions in the knowledge economy, specifically, social media management.

This research adds to the emerging, yet growing, body of literature that analyzes how various professions experience human branding by focusing on social media managers. The research extends the work on symbolic interactionism by applying the theoretical lens to understand the personal branding practices of social media managers. With a focus on social media management, the practice of personal branding is especially prevalent now in an unstable economy with spreading precarious work. As lead users of social media, social media managers provide critical insight into the emerging practices of personal branding on social media that may spread to other professions. The development of the future audience can hopefully be a useful tool to understand other professions and experiences of personal branding.

Limitations and future research

This research embraces a qualitative research design considering the understudied area of personal branding amongst social media managers. This research showcases the perspective of a unique group of digital media producers who are heavily engaged with social media. The research identifies how social media managers use digital technologies both personally and professionally to build their personal brand. A focus on social media managers provides a lens through which we can understand personal branding in a shifting social media landscape and the blurring of personal and professional lives in an increasingly commercialized sphere. The work of engaging in social media professionally mirrors the work of living on social media personally. Social media managers work in social media and, by extension, serve as extreme examples of living on social media.

The exploratory nature of this research does not afford generalizability to the general population but rather aims to elicit deep insight and an extreme manifestation of lead social media users. Furthermore, given the extensive data collection, this research would be difficult to replicate. A follow-up study with the same participants could allow for a longitudinal perspective on the changes taking place in the emerging profession of social media management. The research is limited in the use of interviews that was restricted to participants in one geographic location in a major technological hub. Alternative methods would be able to uncover other findings, and future research could consider using a quantitative research design; large-scale surveys could be used to analyze the prevalence of the findings and extend the research. Considering that social media is widely used by businesses around the world, future research could assess whether the findings are applicable in other countries to identify the common issues, as well as local nuances, of social media work.

As work in social media becomes more commonplace and new professions emerge in the social media industry, it would be interesting to analyze the professionalization of the industry. Currently, women tend to dominate social media management, but the valuation of this type of work may change over time as the industry matures. For social media managers, personal branding is commonly accepted as a necessary part of promotional identity; however, the implementation is still new to many other emerging professions. Personal branding as a trend has spread to other professions and industries that tout the importance of personal branding for career and life success – especially in highly competitive labour markets. Future research could examine the personal branding strategies of other social media-driven professions.

Participant profile

a Agency refers to full-service marketing and communications companies

According to Goffman (1959) , destructive information consists of “facts which, if attention is drawn to them during the performance, would discredit, disrupt, or make useless the impression that the performance fosters” (p. 141). The disruption can be ignored by the audience, be repaired by the individual, or lead to a discredited performance and a shattered impression.

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Further reading

Stoldt , R. , Wellman , M. , Ekdale , B. and Tully , M. ( 2019 ), “ Professionalizing and profiting: the rise of intermediaries in the social media influencer industry ”, Social Media + Society , Vol. 5 No. 1 , pp. 1 - 11 , doi: 10.1177/2056305119832587 .

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Leslie Regan Shade for her critical contributions and support throughout the research project. The author would also like to thank Rhonda McEwen and Nicole Cohen for their feedback on the research.

Corresponding author

About the author.

Jenna Jacobson is an Assistant Professor at Ryerson University’s Ted Rogers School of Retail Management. She is also a Research Fellow at Ryerson’s Social Media Lab. Her research analyzes the consumer and producer perspectives of digital technologies with a focus on social media, branding, digital retailing and user behaviour.

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Personal Branding and the Role of Public Relations

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Personal Branding is becoming an important factor, above all in connection with the marketing of individuals (personality or celebrity marketing). Agencies and consultants are increasingly accompanying politicians, businessmen and women, scientists, artists and sports professionals as well as individuals from showbiz, the fashion and TV worlds as they become public figures/personal brands, with the result that over the last 50 years, the branding process for individuals has increased substantially. Marketing and PR experts have developed many strategies for achieving and sustaining high visibility and have refined their methods for delivering the brand. In his book, "High Visibility. The Making and Marketing of Professionals into Celebrities", Kotler, one of the best known experts on marketing, analysed the US market for celebrities with his team and attributed PR with the most dominant role of all communication disciplines: "the most essential support for most aspirants comes from public relations" (cf. Rein et al., 1997: 268). In the third (revised and expanded) edition of "High Visibility" with the new subtitle "Transforming Your Personal and Professional Brand" the authors claim that "PR is essential because all aspirants in the visibility-marketing process need distribution of their image. The role PR plays in the visibility industry involves enabling, designing, managing, and protecting the brand image" (Rein et al., 2006: 290).

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Nessmann, K. (2010). Personal Branding and the Role of Public Relations. In: Terlutter, R., Diehl, S., Okazaki, S. (eds) Advances in Advertising Research (Vol. 1). Gabler. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-8349-6006-1_25

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11 chatgpt prompts to build your personal brand.

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11 ChatGPT prompts to build your personal brand

Personal branding is not just for influencers. CEOs and founders need to get involved. This isn’t conjecture, the stats back this up. 77% of consumers are more likely to buy from a company when the CEO's active on social media. 82% trust companies more when their leaders show up online. And a company's reputation? 49% comes directly from the reputation of its CEO.

But it's not just about the C-suite. 88% of people trust recommendations from people they know over any ad. And 45% of decision-makers said thought leadership has directly led them to award business to a company (despite only 20% of people who create thought leadership content believing it makes a difference).

The message is clear: your personal brand matters . A lot. So make your plan right now. Copy, paste and edit the square brackets in ChatGPT, and keep the same chat window open so the context carries through.

Ready to build your personal brand? 11 ChatGPT prompts to get started

Define your brand.

"Acting as a personal branding coach, guide me through defining my personal brand. First, ask me about my business goals with direct questions such as “What’s the ONE thing you want to achieve this year?” Then, tell me the key elements I should focus on."

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Know yourself before you show yourself.

Craft your statement

"Help me create a compelling personal brand statement that clearly communicates who I am, what I do, and the value I provide. [Provide some information about your skills, values, and goals.]"

Put the statement somewhere you can see it at all times, so you never forget. It’s your elevator pitch on steroids.

Build your online presence

"I want to build an online presence that reflects my personal brand. For this I need to create content. Ask me questions about my expertise, how I enjoy producing content, and what my audience needs to hear. Use my answers to advise me on optimizing my social media profiles and creating consistent content."

If you're not online, you don't exist.

Showcase your expertise

"Suggest ways to showcase my expertise and build credibility in my industry. First, ask me about my industry. Then advise me how I can leverage platforms like blogs, podcasts, or public speaking to strengthen my personal brand. Use specific examples."

Show, don't tell.

Plan your content

"Help me create a content plan that supports my personal brand and engages my target audience. What types of content should I focus on, and how often should I post?"

Consistency is key. But quality trumps quantity.

Network like a pro

"What are some effective strategies for networking and building relationships that enhance my personal brand? Suggest 5 actions I should take this week to achieve this, based on what you know about my goals and business."

Your network is your net worth.

Connect with mentors

"Guide me through identifying and reaching out to potential mentors or influencers who align with my personal brand. Describe five people who would make my perfect mentor and ask me if I know anyone like that. If not, suggest where I could find them and how I can approach them, to spark and nurture genuine connection."

Stand on the shoulders of giants.

Tell your story

"How can I use storytelling to enhance my personal brand? Help me craft a narrative that resonates with my audience and reflects my journey and values. Ask me questions about my experience, history, and why I created my business. Then transform it into 3 simple stories that I can tell."

People remember stories , not stats.

Measure your success

"Suggest ways to measure the success of my personal branding efforts. What key metrics or feedback should I look for to ensure I'm on the right track?"

If you can't measure it, you can't improve it.

Handle the haters

"Acting as a PR expert, advise me on how to handle negative feedback or challenges to my personal brand. What strategies can I use to maintain a positive reputation?"

Haters gonna hate. Handle it with grace.

Stay relevant

"Help me refine and update my personal brand regularly. What steps should I take to ensure my brand stays relevant and aligned with my goals? Create a brand checklist, for me to score my efforts and results every month, so I keep improving and evolving."

Evolve or dissolve.

Build your personal brand: ChatGPT prompts to make a solid plan

Use these prompts to dive deep with ChatGPT. Tailor them to your specific needs and keep refining until you know how to begin. Your personal brand is about the value you bring to other people. It’s about your expertise, your passion, and your unique way of delivering information.

Having a strong personal brand reduces your marketing costs to zero. It attracts the best customers, team members and opportunities. In 2024, you can’t not have one. Now go make your mark. The world's waiting.

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• Racist, sexist, homophobic or other discriminatory comments
• Attempts or tactics that put the site security at risk
• Actions that otherwise violate our site's  terms.

So, how can you be a power user?

• Stay on topic and share your insights
• Feel free to be clear and thoughtful to get your point across
• ‘Like’ or ‘Dislike’ to show your point of view.
• Protect your community.
• Use the report tool to alert us when someone breaks the rules.

Thanks for reading our community guidelines. Please read the full list of posting rules found in our site's  Terms of Service.