In a previous article, I shared with you the importance of understanding, building and communicating your personal brand and outlined the three-step process for doing so. In this article, I provide greater detail into Phase I: Unearthing your unique promise of value.

Personal branding is critical to career success. Gone are the days of pension plans and corporate uniforms. Today, successful professionals manage every aspect of their own careers. They get ahead by establishing a solid reputation — by building and nurturing their personal brands.

When I work with executives on building brands, they're very comfortable building their corporate or product brands. When it comes to applying branding to themselves, however, they're often more reticent. Executive branding can feel a little self-indulgent. Challenging. Weird.

So where do you start?

Just as with the corporate brands you manage, the first step in building your personal brand is to develop a clear understanding of your unique promise of value. Winning brands aren't created or artificial: They're uncovered. Unearthing your authentic and distinctive value as an executive sets the branding process in motion and enables you to separate yourself from executives with similar skills and abilities. Having a clear and accurate picture of your authentic brand is critical to achieving your professional goals. This is especially true for those on the higher rungs of the corporate ladder.

To unearth your brand, you need to be thoroughly mindful of three human elements: yourself, your target audience, and your peers or competitors. It's at the intersection of these three elements that you'll find your 'unique promise of value.'

If you know yourself, you can grow yourself

Branding starts with your goals; all successful brands have an aspirational component. Where do you want to be?

To begin building your brand, you need to have clearly developed and documented objectives for what you want your career to look like in the next year, five years, and ten years. That's because your goals give your brand direction. When you know where you want to go, you can focus your brand point on the horizon. Yogi Berra once said, "If you don't know where you're going, you'll end up someplace else." Where do you want to end up?

Although brands are aspirational, powerful brands are grounded in authenticity. In other words, your career success is directly proportional to how you acknowledge and apply your strengths, values, passions, and vision. When you align what you do and how you do it with who you are and what makes you distinct, there is no limit to where you can take your career. You must therefore become extremely self-aware, understanding what drives your creativity, self-motivation, and success.

In addition to this self-awareness, you need to get input from those around you. While branding is all about what's genuine and authentic to you, your brand is actually held in the hearts and minds of those who know you. You need to understand how you're perceived externally to have a real handle on your brand.

Just as we think 'family entertainment' when we think of Disney, it's what your external constituencies think of you that counts. When you get to a certain level in an organization, you sometimes hear what people think you want to hear rather than what they're actually thinking. Having a clear and constructive perspective from the outside will help you validate and refine what you've learned about yourself from the inside. Some of my executive clients are amazed at the valuable input they receive when they just ask for feedback in a way that allows their respondents to be candid (anonymously or just 'approachably').

Building congruence between who you are and how you're perceived is a critical step in the branding process. When the portrait others paint of you looks like a copy of the portrait you paint of yourself, you're well on your way to building a strong brand.

With this clear picture of who you are from both an internal and external perspective, you can start to think about your target audience — those people who need to know about you so you can reach your goals, people whose goals are aligned with yours.

Know who needs to know about you

All successful brands seek to influence a focused group of people — those people whose goals are aligned with theirs. Just as Volvo aims their message of safety and security at new parents, you need to define your target audience. Strong brands limit their communications to just those people who need to know about them. It would exhaust your resources to attempt to communicate to the world at large.

The best way to develop a clear and complete profile of your target audience is to take a look at your long-term goals. Determine who needs to know about you so you can reach those goals: Create a detailed profile of just those people. Some of us can identify members of our target audiences by name, others by industry, job title, location and other demographic data.

As you clarify who they are, you can start to learn the best ways to reach them. What organizations do they belong to? What events do they attend? What Web sites do they visit for information? Knowing where and how you can reach the members of your target audience will make it easier for you to build a plan to increase your visibility with them.

And when you're clear about your target audience and how to best reach them, you can begin to describe the third human element that's essential to understanding your brand — your competitors or peers.

To stand out, be outstanding

There are many qualified candidates for most job openings and the competition is increasing by the day. Ensuring you stand out from among other candidates is critical. But how can you stand out unless you know among whom you're standing? Be clear about who they are and what you all have in common.

The more senior your role, the less important your university degree becomes and the more important your reputation or brand becomes. Knowing what's common among you and your peers will help you determine what attributes separate you from them and enable you to emerge as the ideal candidate for that ultimate position.

Being clear about your differentiating attributes is essential. What makes you unique? Outstanding? Exceptional? There are numerous others who have similar university degrees and years of experience. What separates you from your peers is likely to be much more personal — intrinsic to who you are and how you act.

After you know what separates you from your competitors, ask yourself which of these attributes are relevant and compelling to your target audience. Which will help you get your next big gig? Which will help you remain in control of your career?

The first phase of the personal branding process is all about clearly defining your unique promise of value — what's authentic to you, how to differentiate yourself from the competition and how to identify what is relevant and compelling to your target audience. This is the most important phase of the process. It forms the foundation on which you'll build your brand. Take care to get this part right. Building your brand without the utmost clarity about your unique promise of value is like building a skyscraper on quicksand.

Once you have a clear description of your brand, document it and put it somewhere you'll always see it. It should serve as a constant reminder of your unique promise of value and help you remain consistent in exuding your brand.

Unearthing your unique promise of value - Follow these five steps

1. Document your ultimate goal for your career, then break it into milestones and into actionable tasks.
2. Think about what drives you — what you're most passionate about — and decide how you can link this to your goals.
3. Be clear about your values — your operating principles. High-performance career options will be in organizations whose values align with yours.
4. Make a list of the characteristics of the people who need to know about you (age, geography, gender, job titles, industries they work in, etc.). Then identify the five best ways to reach them.
5. Think about what separates you from all of your peers. What makes you stand out? Then ask yourself how you can showcase that differentiation.