Is Personal Branding A Good Idea? Evaluate The Pros And Cons To Make Better Decisions

Personal branding is often applauded as a crucial career strategy, and for good reasons.

The concept of personal branding is simple: invest your time in developing an identity for your brand, associate with new people, and foster your content. This strategy helps establish trust with new clients and customers and can offer more sales opportunities. Therefore, it is not surprising that both marketers and entrepreneurs prefer personal branding. However, it is also essential to note that this business strategy comes with real risks too. Let us evaluate some pros and cons of personal branding to help you make better decisions.

Pros: It enables brands to create their own marketing strategy.

It allows entrepreneurs to develop their own marketing strategies to promote their products to specific demographics. Since there are no associations to a central brand, you can target a distinct audience without affecting other products. Different messages and images can be used to target specific consumers.

Cons: Diminishing returns

Personal brands are not created overnight. Entrepreneurs become successful after pouring thousands of hours into strategy curation. Personal branding demands a massive investment of resources and time. You will have to spend several hours every 7 to 8 days updating your brand’s social media profiles, posting new content, and maintaining audience engagement. At some point, you might question if all that additional time is yielding the desired results. There is no guaranteed ROI—despite maintaining a favorable track record for your brand’s overall strategy—and the effort to maintain that may also seem overwhelming.

Pros: It unties the brand’s reputation with its products.

When you practice personal branding, the failure of one company will not adversely impact the national, global, or even local reputation of the brand.

Cons: It leads to market cannibalization.

When a new brand enters the marketplace, it inevitably impacts the existing competitive brands negatively, within the same space. Although your goal is to reach a specific customer base that is not attracted to an existing product, your product will still rob sales from other existing brands. It may result in the overstatement of a new brand’s performance, while its impact on an older company may be understated because consumers tend to shift to the new brand from the old one.

Pros: Generates consumer loyalty.

Consumers often develop relationships with all the brands they are fond of. These relationships are extremely beneficial because it generates loyalty of the customers to the products of the brand. It helps foster long-term repetitive sales, ultimately culminating in a growing organization.

Before taking a big entrepreneurial leap, consider these advantages and disadvantages to help your brand grow.