You can control necessarily what’s happening at your company. For me the true test is not ‘are you immune from vicissitudes or lay offs?’ because you can’t control what’s happening at a macro economic level. It proved almost impossible to get another journalism job, so I really had to reinvent myself and try to figure out a new thing that I could do and I realized that it would be a heck a lot easier for me or for anybody else if you have the kind of really strong brand that has developed so that people are seeking you out specifically. I mean, newspapers, we forget now, was a very, very lucrative business and all of a sudden Craigslist was just going nuts taking everybody’s business and so my newspaper laid me off and it was during a bad recession. It was right around the tipping point where the internet started to erode the newspaper’s profits, which had been very fat for a long time. I started my career as a political journalist and I was about a year out of grad school, I had been working as a reporter for a year and unfortunately had entered the profession at a pretty bad time. I started to learn about it and to try to help other people figure out they could get a little bit ahead of the curve as compared to where I was. Well, I got interested in branding essentially because I needed career insurance and I came on board too late. Before we dive into that, I want you to take our readers, if you will, back a little bit - how did you start out? What made you become interested in branding and how did you write your first book and all that good stuff? You know, I always love to hear about the concept of branding and I was listening to one of your talks where you said that your personal brand is, “your career insurance” which I think is such a great way to think about that. My goodness, what an impressive background.

She teaches at Duke school and is a former presidential campaign spokesperson.

She’s also a contributor for Forbes and Harvard Business Review. She consults for companies like, oh, I don’t know, Google, Microsoft, Yale. One is called ‘Stand Out’, the other is ‘Reinventing You’. Today’s guest is Dorie Clark, who is a branding expert according to AP.

Stand out by dorie clark