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Top Managers’ Personal Branding in a Corporate World: Strategizing and Overcoming Dualities Along the Career Path

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Abstract

Personal branding is one of the numerous themes the managerial work and practices of top managers are attributed to. Despite the importance of personal branding as a catalyst for careers, there is still very little empirical evidence on how top managers’ personal brands actually emerge and what they themselves do to shape these brands. This paper opens the black box of personal brand development by deploying a process and practice perspective and argues that personal branding is a distinct key practice in itself underlying managerial work for managers at all career stages. Using multiple strategies to analyze process data within and across six top manager cases, we identified three distinct key practices—managing position, managing individuals, managing visibility—describing how they managed the development of their personal brands across their career stages. Central to this is managing dualities like “Fitting In vs. Standing Out” and overcoming the tensions accompanying these dualities. We highlight the practical implications for today’s managers and add to the literature on personal branding.

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Notes

  1. C-levels include chief executive officer (CEO), chief financial officer (CFO), chief operating officer (COO), chief marketing officer (CMO), chief technology officer (CTO), etc.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Chair of Product-Market Relations, Department of Design, Production and Management, Faculty of Engineering Technology, University of Twente, P.O. Box 217, 7500 AE, Enschede, The Netherlands

    Stefan Scheidt & Jörg Henseler

  2. Section Entrepreneurship & Technology Management, Faculty of Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands

    Raymond Loohuis

  3. Nova Information Management School, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Campus de Campolide, 1070-312, Lisbon, Portugal

    Jörg Henseler

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  1. Stefan Scheidt
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Correspondence to Stefan Scheidt.

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Appendix 1: Protocol of the semi-structured interviews with top managers

Appendix 1: Protocol of the semi-structured interviews with top managers

Stages

Questions

Warm-up

First of all, we are interested in understanding you as a person. Can you please give us some information about what characterizes you (societal background, family, parents, special events in your childhood and youth, school etc.)?

Pre-branding

When did personal branding become an issue for you in your career?

Was this always the case or did it happen later in your career?

How intentional were you in planning to build your personal brand?

Why was this important to you? What did motivate you to do so?

Personal branding

What events have been critical in the development of your personal brand?

Why were these events critical?

What were the effects of these events?

When did you become aware that you are developing your personal brand for specific target groups?

How did you do this?

Competition

At which moment was it obvious to you that you are competing with others with your personal brand?

In which specific fields did you compete (industry, in the company, to other top managers etc.)?

How did you compete?

Who were your competitors?

Did this field change over time? If so, why did this happen? And how?

How did this affect your personal brand?

Visibility

When did you reach visibility in your career?

What did you do to gain this visibility?

What was the result of your visibility?

Has there been a difference in the emergence of your visibility between your professional field and mainstream media?

How did this happen?

What was the result?

Relationship

Did you build any crucial relationships during your personal branding process?

How did you do so? When?

Why did you form these relationships?

What was the impact of these relationships?

Sponsor

When did you receive any sponsoring in building your personal brand?

How did the sponsor act?

What result emerged from his/her activities?

Did any stakeholder damage you in your personal branding process?

What did he/she do?

How did this affect your personal brand?

Endorsement

Have you ever been endorsed by any other brand?

What other brands have you been endorsed by?

How did this happen?

What was the result?

When did you act as an endorser for other brands through your personal brand?

What other brands did you endorse?

How did this happen?

What has been the result?

Brand Personality

What are the key characteristics of your personal brand personality? How did your personal brand personality develop over time?

When did you develop specific aspects of your brand personality?

How did you do this?

Closing reflections

What were the main enablers and obstacles in your personal branding emergence?

Would you repeat the development of your personal branding?

If not, why not?

If so, what would you keep and what would you do differently to improve it?

Finally, if you had to provide a short definition of personal branding, what would it be?

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Scheidt, S., Loohuis, R. & Henseler, J. Top Managers’ Personal Branding in a Corporate World: Strategizing and Overcoming Dualities Along the Career Path. Corp Reputation Rev (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41299-023-00170-2

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