Cover Story Part II
Cover Story | Part II: SWOT Analysis on Your Personal Brand

SWOT Analysis on Your Personal Brand

Part II- SWOT Analysis on Your Personal Brand

So you have built a personal brand (You, My Friend, Are a Brand: 5 Steps to Building a Strong Personal Brand on previous page) that you are confident of. What now? Well, it is time to break it down, paradoxically, to analyse just how strong and solid it is. That is where the SWOT analysis framework comes into play.

Most people know what the SWOT analysis is. Developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a research team at Stanford Research Institute and funded by Fortune 500 companies, its purpose was to find out the rationale behind the failures of corporate planning of organisations.

Applied in almost all business contexts, the SWOT analysis assists stakeholders to evaluate factors that could impact the success of a new project or direction, as a strategic planning device.

As with the famous matrix associated with the SWOT analysis, it consists of four quadrants: Strengths; Weaknesses; Opportunities; Threats. Each of the four traits corresponds to a single factor: Internal helpful; Internal harmful; External helpful; External harmful.

Having said that, what is hardly touched on is weaknesses and threats may not necessarily be harmful; they are just shortcomings or not ideal. Own it, change it, or re-position it.

So what are the these individual traits?



Swot analysis chart 1

Moving on,

here are a few suggestions and questions to have an idea of how to perform a SWOT analysis on your personal brand:


Swot analysis chart 2



While there are many things to consider, do not be daunted by the matrix because it is meant to be highly effective, insightful, and helpful. This procedure can and should be done at multiple stages and regular intervals to measure and benchmark your brand against internal and external changes as it rolls with the times, so you stay consistently relevant.