Update: this is the old version of the Personal Branding Canvas. There is a new edition with a custom graphical format now part of the Professional Innovation Toolkit.
More info on this page.
During my consulting and training practice I’ve been always obsessed with the idea of teaching Personal Branding in the easiest and most effective way possible. In order to facilitate co-creation with the clients and stimulate their own creativity and good knowledge of their own market, I’ve always studied visual approaches to make it as easy as possible to describe, design and re-invent brands, even for those with no background in branding and marketing. The visual approach is in fact more efficient, faster, allows people to go for the big picture and fires up collaboration, reinvention and sharing ideas with others.
The Personal Branding Canvas
The Personal Branding Canvas is the One-Page Method for Personal Branding teaching and development. In fact the Canvas maps a nine-steps process that helps anyone to create, evaluate, redesign and improve their own Personal Brand.
Business Design
Where did this idea come from? The method is based on recent trends such as Business Design, Business Model Generation, Design Thinking and the approach Business Model You®, developed by Tim Clark and of course on the Business Model Generation book and methodology made famous by Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur. The idea of developing the methodology came after reading Tim Clark’s excellent book “Business Model You”. But I also have to thank a fantastic MOOC course on Design Thinking that the Standford d.school organized last summer on Novoed.com: I loved it and it inspired me so much.
If the Personal Business Model Canvas describes the logic by which a person creates, delivers value to a client, and captures value for him or herself, the Personal Branding Canvas describes the logic by which that person:
- defines his or her promise of value (Offering + Benefits),
- makes it properly known to the right Audience and therefore
- gets the desired Results and increases her Personal Brand Equity.
And the Italian politicians?
Ok, let me write down something very personal now…
As you probably do, if I wake up happy and excited in the morning it is when I know I am going to make a difference somehow.
I don’t know about you, but here is my opinion: I live in a country where some of the most disgusting people are also the most visible.
So many others have competences, stories and visions only waiting to get known, to inspire.
For me the idea of making a difference is to always find better ways to help extraordinary people become more visible and successful.
Building a better world one person at a time.
A proposal: feedback very welcome!
To get back to the business, the Personal Branding Canvas is available for free on this page and it is released under a Creative Commons license.
I would be very happy if you download, print and play with it and get Results… right now!
This first public version includes one modification from the previous versions. The Positioning block, that before was filled with some differentiating ideas in the format inspired by Ries and Trout’s books, now contains a simple and efficient checklist. You can use it with any element from the higher blocks of the Canvas, in order to choose the most compelling differentiating attribute. This is the result of some testing done with an Italian Private Bank where I am running a series of one-day workshop with 45 area managers.
The current Canvas version is not perfect and is intended as a proposal. I would really like to stimulate a discussion around this approach, therefore please let me have your feedback through the comments or via email to info@bigname.pro!