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The process of creating a brand plan and strategy involves organizing your ideas and making decisions about your career directions that you can consistently implement over time. Your strategy and brand plan will evolve, especially as you gain a better understanding of your audience and your niche, or position, among similar services or peers. It may be helpful to write down your plan and revisit it every year to see how you are doing and whether any changes need to be made. In general, your brand plan will involve determining your positioning with respect to your target audience(s), creating brand elements, and strategizing how you will support this plan through activities and communication, also called tactics (Figure 15.1).

Figure 15.1 Personal branding process.

Positioning is how you will use your identity and attributes to stand out and build your brand. It refers to the niche you fill and it is specific to an audience or set of audiences. Many online or print resources describe exercises for writing a brand positioning, but you do not need to follow any formal or standardized formats. In fact, trying to write a positioning statement can detract from the more important process of strategizing. A positioning statement merely needs to describe your goals with respect to a target audience and how you uniquely qualify to fulfill them (Figure 15.2).

Figure 15.2 Elements of a positioning.

For many individuals, this is the most difficult part of the branding process to work through. Most personal branding resources begin with self‐awareness exercises, such as identifying key attributes that best reflect who you are from a list of characteristics. The lists may often seem too generic and lack nuance to individuals who are further along in their professional careers. This may be a result of career services professionals authoring most of these resources and because it is traditional to use these tools with someone who is very young and seeking a career. The traditional branding process at an advertisement agency also begins with an assessment of the product attributes. It makes sense to start with learning about a new product if you are a creative director given a new assignment. As a physician/researcher who is already in a career track, you likely already have a good idea about your strengths, interests, and abilities. Because the underlying purpose of the exercise is really about choosing which attributes to focus on, it is easier to start with thinking about one of your goals, the important audience, and what problems that audience needs to solve. This will point you to the attributes that the audience will value. So, begin by formulating your goals and describing the target audience that is important to each goal. In our first case, a community pediatrician identifies a need to brand himself and his group practice.