This course is part of the Personal Branding: How to Brand Yourself Professionally, Authentically, and with Passion ExpertTrack
Brand Personality: How to Tell Your Story with Authenticity and Relevance
Learn how to hone in on your individuality to build a brand personality that’s genuine and connects with your target audience.
Duration
3 weeksWeekly study
4 hours100% online
How it worksIncluded in an ExpertTrack
Course 2 of 3
Brand Personality: How to Tell Your Story with Authenticity and Relevance
Understand how human behaviour impacts your personal brand
This three-week course will help you make sure your authenticity shines through in your brand. You’ll learn to harness what makes you uniquely you, and how this can make your personal brand more genuine and relevant.
You’ll start by exploring how we as humans think and act. This will help you explore the influence of behaviour and emotions on how we react to and engage with brand messaging.
Delve into consumer behaviour
You’ll explore the link between human and consumer behaviour before understanding how brands tap into emotions to influence their customers.
With this knowledge, you’ll learn how to apply these same techniques to your branding for effective results.
Discover the fundamentals of successful brand communication
You’ll investigate how people think and why this matters in how you present your message and brand accordingly.
This will help you explore the use of tone in successful brand communication and the key concepts of the Transactional Analysis model.
Explore the importance of storytelling in personal branding
Finally, you’ll learn how to make use of the concept of storytelling in personal branding. You’ll explore the seven classifications of stories and how they are used by brands and individuals to appeal to audiences. You’ll get a better understanding of which stories resonate with you and how you can use plot arcs to connect with your audience and get your message across.
You’ll get the chance to apply this to your personal brand, making use of the aspects of yourself that can be conveyed more emotionally in order to make meaningful connections with your audience.
By the end of this course, you’ll feel more comfortable presenting your individuality as well as developing an awareness of how others perceive you.
Syllabus
Week 1
Human behaviour, consumerism and psychology
Welcome to Week 1
Welcome to Brand Personality: How to Tell Your Story with Authenticity and Relevance. In these steps, we think about stories, and how telling your own story with different styles and tones can amplify your personality and brand.
Human behaviour
These steps will explore how we think, feel and what we do. We will also reflect on how understanding biological and psychological signals in others can influence how we develop our personal branding.
Emotional vs rational approach
In these steps, we discuss how you can create stories to support your personal brand. We look at how we craft our stories, and the impact we create through using rational facts or pure emotion.
Consumer behaviour
How can we bring consumer thinking into our personal brand? These steps will explore how we can use emotional hooks to get people to choose us over others and buy into what we do.
Wrapping up Week 1
In these steps, we summarise what we’ve covered this week, and prepare for our deeper study of psychoanalysis and branding in the coming weeks.
Week 2
Communications and psychoanalysis
Welcome to Week 2
Welcome to Week 2! In these steps, we set up our learning for the week. We begin thinking about psychoanalysis and behavioural psychology and discuss the different tones we can use to communicate our message.
Tone
In this activity, we’ll practice perfecting your tone so that you can react and respond to your audience in a variety of styles. This will give your personal brand authenticity, relevance, flexibility and responsiveness.
Presenting individuality
In these steps, we look at how we can bring our own attributes or skills into our personal branding, by describing them using different explanations and conversational styles and crafting a unique personal story.
How people think and why it matters
In these steps, we explore how communications function like transactions, offering value for both parties involved. We'll also see how our different perspectives, experiences and perceptions will impact this two-way process.
Wrapping up Week 2
In these steps, we review the key learnings from this week, and preview our work next week on telling richer brand stories with more sophistication.
Week 3
Cultural trends and storytelling
Welcome to Week 3
Welcome to the final week of this course. These steps open up our exploration by looking at storytelling and how this can be of value to learners looking to build their personal brand.
Types of branding stories
In this activity, we explore the seven basic story plots, and discuss why understanding these plots can help you structure the way that you share who you are, and what it is that you do.
Using stories
We now look at how you can determine which story is right for you. Which story type will fit with who you really are, and with your audience?
Making stories relevant
How do you ensure that when people find you, they know what your line of work is? In these steps, we explore how you can ensure that your activities and communications are relevant to your professional purpose.
Wrapping up this course
We now wrap up the course, with a look back at the main topics and what we’ve learned. You will also have the opportunity to complete a short test to check your understanding.
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Learning on this course
On every step of the course you can meet other learners, share your ideas and join in with active discussions in the comments.
What will you achieve?
By the end of the course, you‘ll be able to...
- Summarise the building blocks as to how humans think and feel
- Justify whether to use emotional or rational approach depending on the context
- Investigate the connection between human behaviour and consumer behaviour
- Summarise the role of tone in successful brand communication
- Develop the tools to be able to present individuality more effectively
- Investigating theories around how people think in order to present yourself your message or your brand accordingly
- Describe different types of stories and how they might be used in branding (seven basic plots)
- Experiment with using stories in personal branding
- Identify and incorporate appropriate trends to increase a story's relevance
Who is the course for?
This course is designed for those interested in building their personal brand.
Whether you’re a student, an established business professional, a social media influencer, or an entrepreneur, this course will provide useful insights into successful branding.
Who will you learn with?
I’m an award-winning practitioner and academic with two doctorates, and over 200 pieces of published work. I’ve travelled to 40 countries and worked on branding everything - from countries to people
Who developed the course?
FutureLearn
FutureLearn is a leading social learning platform and has been providing high quality online courses for learners around the world over the last ten years.
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