A Personal Branding Building on YouTube

YouTube an American video platform that allows users to upload, view, rate, share, comment on videos and subscribe to other users. With the introduction of such platform, personal branding has evolved into a phenomenon not exclusive to professionals and celebrities. Social media has enabled personal branding to take a new form, in which people brand themselves through the content that they share on their personalized profiles.

Tarnovskaya (2017) examined and discussed how YouTubers create their personal brands online through a qualitative content analysis of a total of 72 videos created by four successful YouTubers during several years of their social media presence. The picked YouTubers had at least 1 million subscribers and had been active on YouTube for at least 3 years. Tarnovskaya (2017) determined the themes related to brand identity, positioning, image as well as the brand-building process were identified and categorized with the help of an empirically-based coding manual. Ultimately, specific patterns related to personal branded content and process were identified and analyzed, thereby allowing for the subsequent conceptualization of personal brand content and process.

The result shows that Youtubers are actively involved in personal branding and they conduct stages close to those deployed by conventional product or service brands. The three main stages are building the brand, enforcing the brand, and maintaining the brand (Tarnovskaya, 2017).

The characteristics or key features of brand content were identified in each of the three stages.

In the first stage of building the personal brand, it’s necessary to have a clear brand profile and stay loyal to it. The main elements of the personal brand profile consists of the YouTuber personality, typical topics, the tone of voice, and the environment.

The second stage of enforcing the personal brand is about enhancing and promoting it via different social media accounts to raise the visibility of the individual brands.

Maintaining the personal brand in the third stage is fundamental to promote and develop personal interactions with the audience to encourage the co-creation of new content. This is also important as well for personal brands to stay relevant to their audience.

In my opinion, the study provides evidence of the applicability of classical principles of product branding and typology of consumer-brand relationships as well as brand meaning co-creation to the personal branding phenomenon. Thus, personal branding on YouTube might be seen as a re-invention of traditional branding, but on a completely different level of interaction and visibility. In my point of view, the study have multiple managerial implications, as managers are encouraged to stay aware of the increasing influence of successful YouTubers as personal brands on the Internet. It is important that managers monitor and analyze what is being said about their brands by the famous personalities online, as these individuals are capable of influencing consumer comprehension about brands and companies.

References:

Tarnovskaya, V., 2017. Reinventing Personal Branding Building a Personal Brand through Content on YouTube. JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS RESEARCH AND MARKETING