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Personal branding is a strategic tool of marketing and communication to define success in organisations. While it constitutes a conscious attempt to commodify self and audit self, it must be intentionally managed to obtain its optimum results. This study aims to illustrate how personal branding may also pose unintentional and unconscious strategic tool for women academics in academia to help them get wider visibility and increase their chances of getting into leadership positions.

We employed a case study approach and convenience sampling to select our unit of analysis. Three universities in both public and private universities in the eastern regions of Indonesia were purposefully selected, and interviews were held with 30 female leaders occupying and occupied middle and lower leadership hierarchies.

Our research shows that, despite their unintentional, unplanned and poorly designed personal branding, women have been able to advance to their current leadership positions by building their own rooms for practising their own preferred leadership values to get them visible and heard. This way is performed through a gendered networking, previous leadership experience and bureaucratic requirements. The consequence of such a practice may limit the range of visibility to getting noticed as worthy individuals for senior leadership roles. This might be one reason why women are scarcely found in senior leadership positions.

We propose that natural strategies of constructing, narrating and marketing or communicating personal branding in academia through authentic actions can also be helpful for the success of women to get to leadership roles in a smaller and ambient environment.

Social media management is an emerging profession that is growing as companies increasingly adopt social media. The purpose of this paper is to analyze social media managers’ personal branding.

In-depth qualitative data is drawn from 20 semi-structured interviews with social media managers and supported by three years of orienting fieldwork in Toronto, Canada.

Social media managers are responsible for managing and executing organizations’ brands and presence on social media and digital platforms. As lead users of social media, social media managers provide critical insight into the emerging practices of personal branding on social media. “The future audience” is introduced to describe how individuals project a curated brand for all future unknown and unanticipated audiences, which emphasizes a professional identity. Due to workplace uncertainty, social media managers embody the mentality of being “always-on-the-job-market”, which is a driver for personal branding in their attempt to gain or maintain employment.

While personal branding is largely discussed by industry professionals, there is a need for empirical research on personal branding that examines how various employee groups experience personal branding. This research fills this gap by analyzing how people working in social media brand their identity and how their personal branding is used to market themselves to gain and maintain employment. The development of “the future audience” and “always-on-the-job-market” can be used to understand other professions and experiences of personal branding.

The purpose of this article is to investigate sports branding at the personal level by focusing on the evolvement, growth and sustainability of the ANNIKA BRAND – an extension of Annika Sörenstam's success on golf courses worldwide.

A qualitative case study method inspired by “symbolic interactionist” aspects and focusing on Annika Sörenstam's commercial success with personal sports branding and its interdependence with sports branding at the product and corporate levels. Data collection was conducted in accordance with interpretative research traditions and hence based on qualitative semi‐ structured research interviews.

The “hybrid” nature of sports brands draws highly on “emotional capital” and “social currency”. Personal sports branding acts as a “hybrid”, which facilitates “hybrid” branding relationships between personal sports brands and sports brands at the product and corporate levels – often underlining good ROIs for all involved parties if the sports branding process is executed well strategically. This article presents personal sports branding as a hybrid phenomenon, which is dynamic by heart and part of a well‐coordinated process engaging several partners.

The practices and activities of the ANNIKA BRAND is a showcase for sports branding practitioners thinking about sustainable business models.

This paper is unique in offering a roadmap for how personal sport stars may approach brand development and growth while discussing key points of the interdependence between sports brands at the personal, product and corporate levels.

Personal branding becomes a new in-demand skill for all professionals today. To be well-known helps to achieve success in the networked business environment. Personal relationships and a good reputation in the reality of network economy help young artists and art designers move up the career ladder. This paper aims to discuss a problem of artists who often find it difficult to define their artistic and self-distinction identities. The concept of personal brand and branding seems quite irrelevant, especially in reference to their own selves. People usually associate branding with marketing, which in our minds is usually the same as “pushy” and aggressive sales practices. Their find problematic to promote themselves. The purpose of this paper is to highlight that, based on existing theories, artistic identity creation in connection with the skill of personal branding is crucial for personal success in the profession of today’s young artists and art designers.

The study was conducted based on the data originally collected among artists, designers, architecture professionals and students. The data have been analyzed with the equal structural equation modeling method.

This paper presents empirical evidence that if artists view themselves as personal brands, it affects their personal performance in a positive way.

Authors claim that a teaching curriculum for young adult artists should include a personal branding program, to help them find and support their artistic identity and express their personal values and self-brand distinction, and leverage them to build their professional career.

This is one of the first studies to quantify the self-brand performance of young art designers as a benefit of being self-brand oriented.

This study investigates the personal branding strategies utilized by Iranian professional athletes. It also examines the challenges these athletes face in attempting to create a personal brand. For example, unlike their global counterparts, Iranian athletes’ access to social media is limited to only Instagram, due to a ban in Iran on the use of Facebook and Twitter. This specific situation provides unique opportunities and interactions in the personal branding process.

Utilizing a criterion purposive sample of Iranian professional athletes, the authors conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews to understand the branding strategies and challenges of these athletes.

Two categories (branding strategies and cultural/societal challenges), along with Six themes emerged. The categories were derived based on the literature review and the subsequent research questions.

This paper provides valuable information on challenges and opportunities for athletes' personal branding from international perspectives. Also, the results of the study broaden our understanding of how athletes' personal branding can function in different countries and contexts. Findings will provide governing bodies and sport marketers have a better understanding of athletes' social media usage.

This research aims to explore generation (Gen) Z's personal branding on social media when job seeking.

Gen Z students, in their final year of university, were interviewed about personal branding, as well as recruiters and career advisors to gain insights into the recruitment process and expectations of online personal brands. Before interviewing, Gen Z students' LinkedIn profiles were examined, and then fed into the interview process.

Using impression management theory, the findings show that Gen Z perceive online personal brands as a crucial tool to gain more advantage in job markets. A gap was found between desired and perceived selves in Gen Z's online personal brands. Strategies such as effective self-reflection, authentic communication, self-promotion processes, awareness of risks and constantly controlling digital footprints were suggested to build stronger and more coherent personal brands. Gen Z are in favour of a more dynamic, interactive, work-in-process of authentic personal brands.

This research demonstrates the importance of authentically building online personal branding strategies and tactics to bridge the divide between Gen Z's desired and perceived images in personal branding on social media when job seeking.

The purpose of this study is threefold. First, human brands are conceptualized and the distinction between them and personal brands is established. Second, human-brand research is reviewed in light of a strategic brand management framework and gaps in the knowledge that may suggest new research pathways are identified. Third, the extent to which a brand management model designed for products could be applied to human brands is explored.

A systematic literature review was conducted in this study. The content analysis of the selected set of papers allowed the assessment of the state of this field of brand management and the identification of proposals for future research.

Substantial research exists on different aspects of human brands. However, these studies are fragmented in nature, thus highlighting the need for specific and complete human-brand management models.

A limitation of this literature review is that it is based on a sample of papers collected by one specific criterion; furthermore, the way the papers were classified may be challenged. However, this study provides a comprehensive picture of studies on human brands available today.

A parsimonious distinction and connectivity between human and personal brands suggest a branding-by-individual continuum. Additionally, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first identifiable one that summarizes the growing literature on human brands, reveals important gaps in the knowledge and calls for the development of particular human-brand management models.

The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into how engineering employees perceive the functional, ethical and political dimensions of the corporate brand and its meaning(s) for other stakeholders.

The paper explores brand meaning and brand attachment in the case of employees in an engineering consultancy firm operating within the defense and artillery systems sector. In-depth interviews with managers and consultants at a cross-section of organizational levels along with thematic and reflexive interpretation of qualitative data have been carried out.

Identity-based definitions of the brand, the definitions of a “strong engineering brand”, associations of the corporate brand with engineers’ personal brands, brand essence and integration and the meanings of a military brand have all been raised, explored and discussed from the engineer’s perspective.

This paper is among the first of its kind to pursue brand research in an engineering-intensive firm with military and defense brand associations. Future research is encouraged to add further detail and verification to the themes and findings of this paper.

The military context is enmeshed with high levels of sensitivity and difficult research access particularly upon brand-related academic research. This has led in part to very limited marketing and branding knowledge into this setting despite its significance.

Given that the engineering consulting sectors are among the top drivers of employment and knowledge advancement, and given that brand associations have considerable impacts on employees’ identification, self-awareness and emotional well-being, understanding the dynamism and complexities of employee-brand associations is inevitable in these settings.

The defense context has unique characteristics and has hitherto remained an under-researched context with respect to branding. This is despite that the defense sector deserves to be in the spotlight because professionals’ voices are rarely heard and acknowledged within the branding literature.

The purpose of this paper is to examine wellness as a means of self-branding. The phenomenon is addressed through the introduction of a new concept – wellness branding – and by identifying those wellness practices that are currently most valued.

A series of focus group interviews were conducted in the USA and Finland. Altogether, 12 discussion sessions (N = 57) were carried out, 6 in each country.

Both wellness and self-branding represent current forms of identity and lifestyle construction and self-promotion. Moreover, they represent an entrepreneurial view of the self, which emphasizes self-governance. The findings indicate that wellness has moved beyond the merely physical dimension, to significantly involve emotional/mental, spiritual, social and intellectual aspects. This further strengthens the transformational nature of wellness and the increasing need for balancing one’s life in order to reach one’s optimal self. The logic of wellness branding involves the creation of one’s optimal, balanced self while communicating it to others.

This paper makes insightful contributions to the branding literature by broadening the scope of self-branding to a new and timely context. The paper further adds to the consumer research literature by addressing wellness as a form of transformative consumption and an essential part of the current self-care culture.

To the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to discuss self-branding in the context of wellness, introducing a new concept of wellness branding, thus offering a novel area for research.