Whether you’re a business leader, entrepreneur, or professional, building a strong personal brand is key to standing out and showcasing your unique value. A well-crafted personal brand can help you land a job, advance within your company, and even attract investors or partners for your venture.
But personal branding is rarely a one-time effort. You must regularly evaluate your brand to ensure it aligns with your goals and successfully communicates your differentiators. That’s where a personal brand audit comes in.
Here’s what a personal brand audit is, why it matters, and how to conduct one effectively.
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What Is a Personal Brand Audit?
A personal brand audit is a way to assess how effectively your current brand communicates your personal value proposition to your target audience—regardless of who that audience may be. It serves as a foundational step in defining and enhancing your brand.
“This is a systematic assessment of your brand as it exists now, to determine how well or poorly your current brand supports your vision and sense of self,” says Harvard Business School Professor Jill Avery, who teaches the online course Personal Branding. “It’s about evaluating the foundation upon which you can continue to build and refine your personal brand.”
The goal of a personal brand audit is to gain a deeper understanding of how others, including your target audience, perceive you.
If your audit reveals that your brand doesn’t align with your value proposition or miscommunicates your brand story, you can adjust it. If it confirms that your brand is well-aligned, you can focus on other areas of professional development instead.
Either way, a personal brand audit offers valuable insight into what’s working, what isn’t, and where there’s room for improvement.
Personal Brand Audit Process
Before making any changes to your personal brand, it’s essential to determine your current standing. Use the five steps below to conduct a personal brand audit that can help refine and strengthen your brand.
1. Inventory Your Brand Equity
Your brand equity is the foundation of your personal brand. It includes all the assets already in place to support how your brand is currently perceived. The first step of auditing your personal brand is to take an inventory of your brand equity.
As Avery shares in Personal Branding, your brand evolves throughout your career. To assess it effectively, begin by collecting more source material that reflects how others see and interpret your brand.
As part of this step, Avery outlines brand equity’s five dimensions that likely already shape your personal brand. Evaluating each can help you better understand the building blocks of how others perceive you:
- Credentials: Your education, degrees, certifications, licenses, and awards, as well as your personal and professional experience
- Social capital: Your relationships and networks within an organization or group, including testimonials and referrals that validate those connections
- Cultural capital: The values, interests, and cultural ties shaped by your upbringing, cultural background, and life experiences
- Physical capital: The physical attributes by which others identify you, such as your visual identity, body language, and style
- Personality: The traits, tendencies, strengths, quirks, and emotional intelligence that make you unique
For each category, aim to identify three to five attributes that represent you. This self-assessment can provide clarity on what’s currently contributing to your brand—and where you may want to evolve.
2. Clarify and Refine Core Attributes
With your brand equity inventory completed, it’s time to identify the key attributes that make you distinct. Start by listing at least 10 adjectives you’d use to describe yourself, making sure they reflect:
Next, reflect on the story these attributes allow you to tell. Which ones align with the narrative you want your personal brand to convey? Refine your list by:
- Removing traits that don’t support your brand story
- Combining similar traits into stronger descriptors—for example, use “compassionate leader” instead of “compassionate” and “leader”
Your goal is to narrow your list to three standout descriptors that communicate who you are and what you have to offer your target audience.
If you have more than one audience—such as current colleagues and potential future employers—don’t be afraid to tailor these descriptors to each.
3. Assess Public Perception
Once you’ve defined how you want to be perceived, you must assess how others currently see you. One way to make this assessment, as highlighted in Personal Branding, is to conduct an online search of your name to see what results are returned. In addition to supporting your brand audit, this allows you to uncover what others, like prospective employers or clients, might find when they search for you online.
Tip: If you have a common name, try adding qualifiers such as your job title, location, or organization to narrow the results.
The results of your search will depend on the strength of your digital footprint. For some professionals, there may not be many results; others may uncover a variety of online content, including:
- Personal and professional social media profiles
- Awards or honors you’ve received
- News articles or content you’ve been quoted in
- Publications, presentations, events, or speaking engagements
- Images, videos, or audio clips you’ve generated
After reviewing the results, identify at least three positive brand signals—evidence that reinforces your personal value proposition and brand story. These are strengths you can continue to showcase and reinforce across your personal brand.
At the same time, monitor for negative brand signals that detract from your desired brand story and consider ways to minimize them.
4. Seek Candid Feedback from Trusted “Truthtellers”
Once you’ve identified attributes you believe reflect your personal brand, validate your assumptions with real-world feedback. Reach out to individuals whose opinion you trust, whether current or former colleagues, friends, or family members. These are your “truthtellers.”
According to Rachel Greenwald, a professional matchmaker, dating coach, and executive fellow at HBS, truthtellers help you uncover other people’s perspectives on your brand, often in ways you may not realize.
“Ask somebody on a scale of one to 10 to rate you on a certain quality,” Greenwald says in Personal Branding. “So, if you think, for example, that you’re an innovator and that’s going to be one of your personal brand traits, you could say to your truthteller, ‘On a scale of one to 10, how innovative do you think I am?’”
Once you receive a rating, follow up by asking what it would take to improve by one point. The answer can offer valuable insight into how you’re currently perceived and what small changes could help shift that perception.
In addition to this rating method, consider asking open-ended questions to gather deeper insights, such as:
- Which of these traits best describes me?
- Is there something that’s holding me back professionally?
- What adjectives would you use to introduce me to somebody new?
Feedback like this from people whose opinion you trust can be extremely valuable as you assess your personal brand for effectiveness, accuracy, and clarity.
5. Analyze for Alignment and Action
Having gathered all the above inputs, it’s time to begin analyzing your brand to understand the story it’s currently telling—and whether that aligns with the story you want to tell.
Ask yourself the following questions to guide your analysis:
- What themes or patterns appear consistently across the feedback? Do these help or hinder my brand?
- Where do contradictions exist between how I want to be viewed and how others perceive me?
- What’s missing from my brand story? What gaps do I need to fill, whether in my in-person or online presence?
- Does my personal brand effectively differentiate me from others? If not, which attributes should I focus on as points of differentiation?
- If others perceive my brand negatively, how can I address or reframe the situation?
It’s important to be honest with yourself about how effective your brand currently is and how you can improve it. After all, that’s the point of conducting an audit.
Just One Piece of Your Broader Brand Strategy
Conducting an audit is a critical part of defining and communicating your personal brand. But it’s just one piece of a larger, ongoing personal brand strategy. Other key steps include embodying, storytelling, socializing, renegotiating, and visioning, each of which comes with its own processes and challenges.
While it’s possible to define your personal brand on your own, taking that route might mean making a few mistakes along the way. If you want to avoid this trial and error, it can be helpful to enroll in an online course that walks you through the process.
In Personal Branding, Avery defines and details the steps involved in creating an effective personal brand. Upon finishing the course, you’ll have thought critically about the message you want your personal brand to convey and will be armed with a branding media kit and other assets to effectively tell your brand’s story.
Are you ready to develop your personal brand? Explore the online course Personal Branding—one of HBS Online’s marketing courses—designed to help you define what sets you apart and clearly articulate your value. Or, consider our Credential of Leadership, Impact, and Management in Business (CLIMB) program, which includes Personal Branding in the required curriculum.
