Personal Brand Tips From Kris Jenner

Kris Jenner is a media personality and social media influencer who starred in the reality television series Keeping Up With the Kardashians with her family. She also runs the production company Jenner Communications, owns the clothing line Kris Jenner Kollection, and is the author of the autobiography Kris Jenner... and All Things Kardashian.

A personal brand is a unique, public-facing identity that involves building and packaging a persona as you would with a business product. Whether you’re a blogger, small business owner, a public figure, or a regular civilian, developing a strong personal brand can help you achieve professional success.

Smart personal branding efforts—like revamping your personal website or setting up social media profiles adjacent to small businesses—allow your target audience to connect with you in authentic ways.

Management consultant and author Tom Peters introduced the term “personal branding” into the zeitgeist with his essay “The Brand Called You,” which magazine Fast Company published in 1997. Peters has stressed that successful personal branding is not simply a matter of social media popularity, but sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok have enabled billions of people to present curated versions of their lives to as many followers as they can muster.

On the corporate side, it has become common for employers to factor the social media savvy of their applicants into their hiring decisions. Even college admissions boards have adopted the practice. In modern times, every decision you make can have a positive or negative effect on your own personal brand—which can impact your bottom line or professional success.

Branding yourself is a process that requires squaring who you are with the needs of your target audience. Consider this step-by-step approach to get started:

• Conduct research and analysis. Consider the field or specific niche you’d like to establish yourself in and survey prominent figures and thought leaders within that field. Ask yourself what they offer or what makes them appealing to their audiences, and analyze comments or responses to their content to find out what other people think. Businesses call this market research.
• Determine how to use your strengths to project your values. Self-branding is a process of refining and framing the version of yourself that people see. Think about your skills or an area of expertise you have (such as writing, drawing, or public speaking) and how you can best use them to show people the parts of yourself you’d like to highlight. It may be helpful to write a personal branding statement for yourself.
• Create content that reflects your brand identity. It’s vital to settle on a consistent style and type of content so people know what to expect from you. That way, you can build an audience that likes what you have to sell. Similarly, if you are trying to build your online presence on a particular platform, you should also post consistently. Regularity will help your content surface and show people that a piece of content they like isn’t a one-off. Consistency in your content strategy can help build trust with your audience.
• Focus your approach and distribution by platform. Establishing yourself on numerous social media platforms is a sound personal branding strategy because it helps ensure you’re reaching the widest audience possible. Having a personal website is a good start, but building out your social media profiles on top of that is even better since it helps you get your brand voice out to different audiences.
• Develop collaborations with other brands. Once you’ve created a footprint for yourself, inserting yourself and your perspective onto popular brands’ platforms can bring some of their audience back to you. For example, if you’re a blogger (or even if blogging is one part of your overall output), consider pitching yourself as a contributor to a popular blog. As a form of digital marketing, these guest posts alert readers to what you bring to the table and might even introduce you to new readers via results in search engines.

An accomplished businesswoman and personal branding expert, Kris Jenner has built an empire around the ventures of the Kardashian-Jenner family. Here, she shares her tips for getting a personal brand you are proud of off the ground:

• Consider the look. Kris recommends considering your brand’s aesthetic sooner rather than later since it will be responsible for many people’s first impression of you. “When you start developing your brand, one of the first things you think about is your logo,” the branding expert says. “The colors you’re going to use, and what it’s going to feel like, and what is gonna be your palette.” Your goal is to start communicating with people before you’ve even said a word. Make a list of your favorite colors or visual artists you love. Better yet, create a vision board or mood board that can serve as a visual repository of your ideas.
• Develop your voice. What you say and how you say it are equally important when building a consistent brand. Think about your personal communication style and what comes naturally to you. Maybe you are boisterous and funny or modest and earnest. If you’re unsure of your communication style, think about public speakers or podcast hosts you admire and try to emulate the qualities you find desirable in them until you hone your own unique style. “It’s all about communication,” Kris says. “You have something that you want to share, and you want to be able to communicate that to other people so they become interested in it.”
• Envision your community. If your personal brand resonates with people, it will foster a collective of like-minded individuals. Keep this idea in mind while deciding which influencers, media outlets, and brands you want to associate with or work alongside for content marketing purposes. “It’s all about your character and the way that you interact with people, and creating your own community,” Kris explains. “That’s kind of the mission statement.”
• Establish core values. Your personal brand should be an extension of what you prioritize in your life. “The core values that you learned along the way when you were growing up are what really matter,” Kris says. “What's the legacy you want to leave behind?” When trying to pin down your values, think about your personal passions, the contributions you want to make to the world, and the areas in which you are especially knowledgeable.
• Find the white space. When you locate an area of your brand’s industry in which the competition is relatively light, or when you can create a new market altogether, you have found white space. Finding your white space may be one of the most challenging steps in the personal brand journey, but it’s also one of the most rewarding. Kris puts it this way: “It's really exciting and supportive to be attracted to someone who’s already doing [something], but it's even more exciting to be able to discover something that hasn't been done yet.”
• Tell your story. Kris urges individuals looking to build a successful personal brand to first dedicate time to self-discovery. “If you want to create a brand,” she says, “you have to look inside yourself and spend some time thinking about what really makes you happy. The first step is to figure out who you are, what your story is, and what you want to be known for. How do you want the world to see you?”

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