What do people mean when they talk about your brand?

They mean that your brand is what people think when they think about you and anything that you endorse. Often times we discuss it, but don't dedicate any real energy to branding ourselves. Therefore, here are my steps to properly endorsing your brand and your image.

1. Never Undersell Yourself

What do Gucci, Lamborghini, and Ralph Lauren have in common? Besides being well-known brands, they are also the names of their creators. Never underestimate the power of your own name. Even if it's not the name of your brand or product, you absolutely want to endorse yourself enough so that they become synonymous with one another. So often people automatically take the stance that they have to have some million dollar name in order for it to be worth advertising when that is simply not the case. Another example is Tyler Perry. Regardless of how you feel about his plays or his work, Tyler Perry has built a multimillion dollar empire bearing his own name: Tyler Perry Studios. He branded himself and made it a focal point to emphasize the power behind his name, though to many, "Tyler Perry" is about as conventional as it gets when it comes to names. Don't think that because your name isn't exotic or pronounced with seven syllables that it's not worth using or sharing with the world.

2. Be Consistent

This is the social media age, which means that your social media presence invariably plays a major role in your brand. From a literal standpoint, make sure that your image is consistent across all platforms. This means that in order to best market yourself, your names on social media need to be the same or almost exactly alike. You can't help if your name is @themingotwo on Twitter and somebody else's name is the same on Instagram or Snapchat. Sometimes you just luck out. You have two options: change your name entirely so that you can have the same name across all platforms or use an eerily similar name. When I say similar, I mean using @themingotwo_ instead of @themingotwo, but it is probably best for the sake of consistency to just go ahead and use the name with the underscore for all of your pages if the one without it is already taken. You don't want to be that on Instagram and @mingolingo94 on Twitter because it makes it more difficult for your audience to keep track of you.

From a figurative standpoint, be consistent in your messages as well. Don't preach about love on Twitter but spend all day reposting fight videos on Instagram. For people who really follow you, it can be a turn-off. That doesn't mean that you aren't allowed to stray off the beating path sometimes, but your best bet is to at least attempt to keep a consistent platform across everything. Not doing so, depending on what you're advertising or advocating, can have negative repercussions in the long run.

3. Don't Be a Vulture

This one is very important. This is your brand. Not Sally's brand, not Chris' brand, your brand. Therefore, it behooves you to find a way to make yourself unique and marketable. This doesn't mean that because Chris makes T-Shirts, you can't make T-Shirts. What this means is that if Chris is printing #StayWoke tees and selling them at school, don't go and print #StayWoke trying to compete without having to put in the work to make yourself unique. There are a million things to do and endorse in this world, and while next to none of it is purely unique, a good bit of it can be converted into a niche and used to make you synonymous with it by making it so that when people see your product or brand they say, "That's [Your Name]'s product!"

For those reading this that enjoy hip-hop music, think about Desiigner and Future. For those unfamiliar with said names, the former has been severely criticized (and almost subsequently ostracized in the industry) for being a carbon copy of the latter musically, all the way down to his voice and his delivery. No matter how good Desiigner's music potentially stands to become, he will always be remembered as the guy that got famous because he sounded so much like Future that the two couldn't be told apart from one another in a song. Ouch.

Overall, branding yourself and creating a unique platform to stand on are essential to success. They talk about it, and there are these massive books that go into every nook and cranny, which can all be helpful, but I think that these three steps are the building blocks of the foundation needed in order to properly establish your brand.