Irina Khakamada: Find yourself, not fame, brand for the sake of brand is an exhausting story

It’s a well-known fact that it takes a long time to develop your personal brand. To do it fast is simply impossible because a personal brand isn’t purely fame. It’s a combination of different factors.

Publicity isn’t an end in itself, but an instrument for achieving professional goals.

One can become famous for a day, but you won’t become a brand because of it.

For example, you can take off your clothes and run across the Gorky Park. As a result, the photographs of you will appear in numerous mass media, you’ll give an interview – the Internet will tremble. But it doesn’t mean that you’ll have a brand.

At the beginning of my career, I started to create an image that would help me to move forward in politics. Over time my image has evolved into a brand outside politics and other things I did.

Find yourself, not fame, a brand for the sake of a brand is an exhausting story.

What a personal brand is related to

I’ll mention the main steps in developing your own personal brand.

1. A product is the most important thing

A personal brand must necessarily be in tune with your end goal. Only then you can seriously promote and develop your brand and eventually even change a product itself.

Take my example. My brand was built on politics and my support for small business. But in 2006 I officially left politics and my new goal was to convert everything I’d developed during that time into non-political projects. Then I made my brand on lectures. But notice that I’ve always put a product first, be it political laws and decisions or lectures and master classes.

2. Do PR for free

The second aspect of developing a personal brand is that you should by no means spend money on its promotion.

You should make full use of the social networks and the Internet and create an unconventional message about your product.

The main rule of attracting attention to yourself on social media and in mass media is to be unlike everyone else and to create an event. The print newspapers and magazines are less effective nowadays and if you’re only at the beginning of developing your personal brand it’s better for you to work online and publish your content in the online media.

Use different methods: write original articles, give expert opinions and interviews, connect and collaborate with other bloggers to promote your content.

But the most important principle is not to pay money for it and from the outset be able to convey that you have an unusual product! And learn how to announce your product in an unconventional way.

That’s when you can use online media to promote it. You’ll be in the spotlight anyway, but a product is the main thing.

When I first started to develop my brand, I agreed to appear in all sorts of TV programmes. But then the time came for me to stop. And over time I began to refuse invitations to lightweight programmes and publications. We started to provide serious news opportunities.

In our era of obsession with brand building, everyone rushed to appear on television and in papers – to give interviews, dance, sing, skate – do everything for the sake of developing a personal brand and gaining popularity.

But the tricks of young girls in little dresses with full lips spinning around don’t work anymore – you can’t build a personal brand on that.

Every popular person with a developed brand always has a product to offer. Always position yourself in a professional way.

There will be no brand without a professional product.

Freakishness

You can use freakishness as one of the instruments for promoting your personal brand.

It’s very useful because being a bit freakish is one of the charming images that people associate with freedom of sorts. The image of a person with a quirk is completely acceptable for the Internet. But everything should be in moderation, well-balanced.

Nowadays it became fashionable to «create hype». But what is hype? It’s just a buzzword. People follow a particular trend.

But keep in mind that if everyone rushes to follow this trend and you’re not the first in line, you’re late. That’s why it’s better to establish your own trend so that other people, not you yourself, would create hype around you.

For example, I started to do dance meditation on Instagram and now other stars begin to do the same. It means that they got hooked on my hype. And it’s a lot cooler.

The art of PR and advertising is completely individual. If you’re at the starting line, you can’t repeat all marketing moves that are already being used in this market. You should create an event that is unlike everything else and be persistent, showing different sides of your product.

Individuality is the starting point for positioning.

Take my Instagram as an example. On the one hand, I work according to the laws of the Instagram: there are beautiful pictures, videos, everything is nice and charming. But, on the other hand, I broke all laws of the Instagram by creating, despite its general glamorous nature, small written or spoken posts on intellectual life hacks.

Such originality leads to the exponential rise in the number of subscribers and the promotion of your product without additional expenses.

You should advertise your product. And apply your individuality to this product, creating a unique event.

3. Re-branding takes a lot of time as well

As we have already established, a brand isn’t developed fast. It takes from 5 to 10 years to build a brand recognizable all over the country so that people would associate you with your product even at the furthest corners of the country.

If you want to use your popularity in order to make re-branding or create your brand in a different sphere, it’ll take the same amount of time in order to reach the same heights. For example, I devoted 12 years to politics and created a political brand – the final product was political.

The main thing is to stop when it’s time and re-position yourself.

And only now, another 12 years later, a national brand of Irina Khakamada as a business coach has finally emerged.

This law of re-branding worked not only in my case alone – it has been recognized by many people.

The first person who predicted and showed it to me was my Karate instructor. Like all people who are involved in martial arts, he is a philosopher.

When I was just starting to read lectures, I had moments when I felt like giving up. I got tired of hearing people saying behind my back: why should I go to her lecture if she’s a politician, but talks about something completely different there?

But my Karate instructor told me not to worry. He said: you do your thing, you are persistent, and creating your brand as a coach will take the same amount of time as politics did, but if you work on your product and improve it, it’ll eventually happen within the same time frame. And he proved right.

Self-branding depends on thousands of circumstances. You shouldn’t copy my experience. Create your own quality product and begin your journey towards your personal brand.