Immediately some academics will recoil at the title of this blog. Brands are for Nike, Starbucks, Coca Cola. Not for academics. But I’m afraid this is a rather old fashioned view. Like it or loathe it, the need to curate your brand is real.
You can either consciously curate your brand, or leave it to the vagaries of the internet to curate it for you. I would rather be in charge of mine.
What is your brand?
Your brand is what you stand for as an academic. It is more than your skill set (I know R!). It is more than whether you are a quants or qual person. In fact, it is not really any of these things at all. Your brand is not really your skill set per se. Lots and lots of people have these skills. Your brand is (a) what you are THE expert in (b) what your USP is and (c) what professional image you have created for yourself outside of your institution.
Your brand is not where you work
Academics change workplaces a lot for a wide variety of reasons. Thus your brand is not where you work. Your brand goes with you. Your brand is not what your close friends or even your immediate colleagues think of you. Your brand is not the ‘bio’ that gets trotted out at conference introductions by the Chair who has never met you and has not read a single thing you have ever published. It is not the awful three sentences at the beginning of edited collections that trot out your name, title and affiliation.
Your brand is the shop front. The logo.
Creating your brand
Brand creation happens in your professional interactions with others outside your department. These interactions can be with other academics, stakeholders, policy makers or industry. These interactions can be on In Real Life, or on Twitter, Facebook, Google Scholar, SSRN or any number of other social media platforms.
You have the power to create your brand, or let it be created for you. Managing your interactions, especially on social media, is critical to how you will be perceived by others who may one day recruit you for a job, research, expert advice or other work related opportunity.
What are you THE expert in?
Being an academic requires a lot of flexibility. Even in so-called research intensive, research-led teaching Universities, the reality is oftentimes we do not teach what we are experts in. We might teach on the edges of our wider expertise (if we are lucky). We might simply be required to teach an enormous compulsory subject that all undergrads must take because someone has to. So we can say we know quite a lot about a range of topics. We have flexibility. This is not the same as not having a brand.
Indeed, this is one reason why your brand is not located inside your employing institution. Whatever research excellence you were hired for is long forgotten in the handing out of teaching, which is a process of sticking fingers in a leaking Dam. Constant exposure to this ‘flexibility’ can make you doubt you have any expertise at all. But you do. This is your brand. If there was an imaginary rolodex* in someone’s hand, where would your name be located? What would someone say about you in answer to: ‘Who do I need for this? Oh, yes [blah blah] is the person for x’. Consciously build this brand by promoting this particular expertise through publications, impact and engagement work. And on-line (but more on this next blog).
What is YOUR USP?
What is your unique contribution to field X. Let’s say you are an expert on Brexit. This is a pretty big topic, even within one single discipline. There are by now literally thousands of academics claiming expertise in this area, even within one discipline. Even within one sub-sub-discipline within one country. Thousands. What makes YOU special? What perspective, contribution, and skill set do YOU bring to this topic that makes you more desirable than A, B, or C? And how have you summed this up as your brand identity?
What is your professional image?
What are you known for outside your institution in terms of attitude, or positioning. Do you occupy a specific disciplinary school to which you are an ardent disciple? Do you call out others on Twitter who do not agree with your position? Are you passive aggressive (or just plain aggressive) to those who are outside your knitting circle (obviously the answer to this ought to be NO). Are you a community builder or destroyer? These questions are important particularly when you are at any stage in your career that does not occupy the territory of being 3-years-from-retirement-after-a-40-year-career pigeon hole. And even then, it ought to be important if you are a decent person.
A brand is bigger than the one-trick-pony
Getting known for THE THING is clearly central to building a brand. But beware of becoming a one-trick-pony or talking head. This does not hurt your brand directly, but it hurts your academic reputation in a number of other ways, which in turn compromises your brand. Promotion, for example, requires you to show development of your skills and knowledge, a branching off into other (connected yet different) areas that complement your expertise. Development indicates growth and change, yet this does not warrant a scattergun approach of doing whatever is asked, whatever crosses your desk, whatever the next zeitgeist is. This starts to make you look like jack of all trades, and master of none. Flimsy. And flimsy is not a good brand.
Next week I will continue the academic brand theme by talking about self promotion and engagement.
*a rolodex is a round thingy containing business cards. Think Mad Men. It is how people in the olden days used to locate someone they needed outside their organisation.