Robyn Waters joined Target Stores more than 10 years ago as a trend manager for children's clothing. Today, as part of Target's senior management team, Waters manages the organization's entire trend department.

Target differentiates itself by bringing the upscale ethos of trend to the mass market. Successful trend merchandising requires a clear understanding of the emerging trends in lifestyle and fashion, and a yen for translating them for shoppers to whom price clearly is not an object.

Not coincidentally, those attributes describe Robyn Waters herself. She loves trend. She's tireless at and passionate about it. She has a keen mind and a daring nature to explore the frontier to see what is happening. And she has thrived at Target. The more her ideas have been accepted and used, the more enthusiastic and committed she has become. And the more her ideas have proven themselves in Target's tough competitive environment, the more confidence the organization has shown in her judgment.

"I have never loved a job as much as this one," she says. "The high energy, innovative, forward-thinking nature of Target nourishes my love for trend and making a difference for people."

Brands are typically identified with businesses, but managers can create-and sustain-their own personal brands as well. Successful brands are not a superficial veneer. They are special relationships, the result of contributing substantial, real value to others. And just as the greatest business brands are respected for their authenticity, your personal brand can only succeed when others experience the values, the vision, and the purpose that drive you.

What does a personal brand look like? How will people know it when they see it? Personal brand is a reflection of who you are and what you believe, which is visibly expressed by what you do and how you do it. It's the doing part that connects you with someone else, and that connection with someone else results in a relationship. In reality, the image of your personal brand is a perception held in someone else's mind. As that perception, through repeated contacts between you and the other person, evolves and sharpens, a brand relationship takes form.

Three key features. By creating a strong personal brand that is clear, complete, and valuable to others, you will create a professional and personal life that is much more successful and fulfilling. You win; they win. That's the kind of success that can have far-reaching benefits.

But what's the primary benefit to you of developing a strong personal brand? You get to be more of who and what you are, not less. In other words, you get to live your values-to be acknowledged and to receive credit not only for what you do but also for what you believe. You end up, therefore, feeling a lot better about life in general because you are being true to yourself. That is the essence of true personal success.

To make personal branding work for you, you need to understand how a business brand works. The principles developed and successfully used in business over many years are readily adaptable to personal brands.

For starters, since your brand is a perception maintained in someone else's mind, how others see you is the central issue. A strong brand, corporate or personal, needs to be clearly defined that its intended audience can quickly grasp what it stands for. For a business, the audience is its customers. For a personal brand, it is those with whom you have, or want to have, relationships.

Three components combine to determine the strength of a brand. Strong brands are distinctive, relevant, and consistent.

To truly understand what it means to be distinctive is to learn that it implies much more than being different. Brand building results from understanding the needs of others, wanting to meet those needs, and being able to do so while staying true to your values.

Being distinctive is not the only thing that matters to someone else. What you stand for needs to be relevant to them. Relevance begins when a person believes that you understand and care about what's important to them. It gains strength every time you demonstrate that what's important to them is important to you. The synergistic effect of being both distinctive and relevant is what ignites the power of a personal brand. In a relationship, consistency is established by the dependability of behavior. Over time, people learn that they trust you if they experience consistent trustworthy behaviors. In the absence of personal experience, they may decide to trust you because of what they have learned of your track record from others. Your previous actions-not your intentions-lead them to believe that you can be counted on to behave in a similar way again.

Responding to brand moments. The personal brand you create will become a dynamic presence in your life. But to remain strong, it must be renewed every day. It needs to become a part of everything you do.

On some days, those objectives will be easy to achieve. On other days, you'll face situations that will challenge your ability to stand by the sense of purpose, vision, and values you've chosen to center your life around. You'll also encounter times when your personal brand will be severely put to the test.

Everyday moments offer tremendous potential to define, strengthen, and communicate your brand and its values. You can either dread these moments for the challenges they present or look ahead to them as the opportunities they are. You can even practice responses for how you'll handle them. Either way, you'll face a moment of truth for the brand you want to be.

There are seven ways to prepare yourself for the important situations when you are called upon to summon your personal brand.

The first is to be "brand proud." If you want to be perceived as a strong brand, you have to decide what you stand for, and then you have to be that to the nth degree. You need to work from a firm values platform, not shifting sand. You can't "kind of," "sort of," or "most of the time" believe in your values and act from them periodically when the conditions seem right. You have to live those values consistently and courageously on a day-to-day basis. How else can the people who know you and depend on you trust that they can count on you, no matter how convenient or inconvenient the moment?

Next, audit your brand promises. Continually revisit and refine your brand promise in light of new experiences and insights. Listen carefully to what people say, and watch what they do in response to your efforts. If you're achieving the desired effect, what can you learn from this success to increase the odds of building even greater value with each new contact? If you're coming up a little short, what do you need to do to close the distance between where you are and where you want to be?

Make you the signals you send convey relevance to others. Being a strong personal brand absolutely requires sensitivity to the needs of other people. For many people, finding a balance between "me" and "we" can be a troubling issue in personal brand management. You may have a strong sense of the person you want to be or the signal you want to send. But you may feel anything from vague discontent to outright unhappiness because the connections you expect as a result aren't in place, aren't holding up over time, or aren't validating the sense of value you believe you represent.

Check your frequencies. Could your brand messages and behaviors lack enough passion and energy to be heard? Or could they be indistinguishable from all the other "noise" in the spectrum of daily life? Fine-tune the signals you're sending and you may find that your brand begins to connect in the way that you want it to.

Impeccable parameters. Another means to develop a personal brand that can hold up to any circumstance is by ensuring that your package reflects your contents. How you look and the way you talk can be great tools for establishing a strong personal brand. As an example, imagine Albert Einstein, a wrinkled, disheveled-looking, eccentric genius. His look reinforced the perception that all his energy was being focused on making the next theoretical breakthrough in physics; he didn't have time to comb his hair or make sure his shirt fit. His presentation certainly reinforced his brand platform of intelligence.

Your "package" should be an accurate reflection of what's inside: ensure the impressions you're making are the ones you want to be creating. Set an impeccable standard for everything that adds up to how others perceive you-from your facial expressions and the way you use your hands and eyes to the words you choose, the tone of your voice, and the environment in which someone finds you.

Watch out for the company you keep. Strong brands, just like strong business brands, attract people with similar beliefs. People really do know it when they see it, and they move closer or farther away accordingly. When you're clear about who you are and what you will do on someone else's behalf, people will either accept that or look for a more relevant connection somewhere else. Those who value the things in which you are strong will want to associate with you. Those who don't, won't. That's why it pays to evaluate your relationships. Are the personal brands in your life nourishing your brand or stunting its growth?

Another key route is to synchronize your brand with your employer's. If your organization doesn't share your values, you can stay and struggle-and likely get beaten down from your unappreciated efforts. Or you can go to work for people who appreciate the values you bring to work with you and will align them with their own for everyone's greater success.

Find out what your employer's brand values are and compare them with your own. Are there obvious linkages? Inevitable conflicts? Immediate compatibilities? Major gaps? Against this backdrop, how can you make your own brand values distinctive and relevant in a consistent way?

Finally, consider relationships as part of your asset base. There's a huge difference between building a web of mutually rewarding relationships and storing a file of names in a personal digital assistant or address book. To build a strong and viable relationship with someone calls for a form of selflessness that even mature people must occasionally struggle to attain.

If you decide who you are and the kinds of relationships that are important to you, and then consistently act on that vision and those values, you are being fundamentally true to yourself.

Building a strong personal brand takes time. It involves work. It's an evolutionary process, not a one-time event, as befits the essential nature of relationships. Don't take things for granted. Continuously question, probe, evaluate, and challenge. Then improve to build both the strength of your personal brand and the strength of the relationships people develop with it. And with you.

Reprinted with permission of the publisher. From the book entitled, "Be Your Own Brand: A Breakthrough Formula for Standing Out from the Crowd." Copyrightó 2002 by David McNally and Karl D. Speak, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., San Francisco, CA. All rights reserved. www.bkconnection.com

David McNally is a best-selling author, speaker, and film producer. He has written Eagles Need a Push: Learning to Soar in a Changing World and The Eagle's Secret: Success Strategies for Thriving at Work and in Life. His films and training programs are used by many of the world's most successful organizations, including American Express, Blue Cross, Amway, Pfizer, and Merrill Lynch. Karl D. Speak is president of Beyond Marketing, a glo企业宣传片制作bal management consulting firm. In addition to his consulting assignments, his Executive Branding Workshops, seminars, and keynotes help take the mystique out of brand management issues.