Big businesses spend a massive portion of their budget defining, building, cultivating, and protecting their reputations. How the consumer market perceives the company is its brand, and that brand can make or break the success of a product or service. Take, for example, the Colonial Pipeline breakdown due to a security breach in 2021. In addition to the expense of the breach itself, the company’s brand lost consumer trust and is still working to rebuild it.

As an academic scholar, your reputation is your personal brand. You’re going to have one whether you choose to influence it in a particular direction or not. How others perceive you is largely in part from your actions, behaviors, and accomplishments. Just as in big business, your brand is what defines how successful you can become, and it’s vital that you spend a portion of your resources to cultivate and protect it.

The Importance of Brands in Academia

Maybe you’ve never desired to be “that” instructor. You know, the one that all the students flock to line up for to ensure they get in the course before it’s full. But in reality, there’s more than a popularity contest at stake. The university’s data reflects that these instructors bring in more money through their in-demand courses, and as long as their teaching is effective, this improves the teacher’s reputation.

A higher scholarly reputation gives you more opportunities to receive grants, collaboration requests, and better positions.

5 Tips to Build Your Academic Brand

Part of your scholarly reputation is what you do throughout the day in your career role. However, there are a few other ways you can build your brand. As you purposely work toward a defining perspective that others will think of when they see you, keep these tips in mind:

1. Your online presence is important. What kind of online presence do you have? What do people see when they run your name through a Google search? Your past publications, your accomplishments, and other professional achievements should be some of the first things to appear. However, your social media platforms will also show up and be scrutinized. Consider making the switch to professional research platforms like Impactio, where you can build and expand your networking connections without the casual associations that come with more personal social media profiles.
2. Be consistent when you post. Do you have an institution web page, a professional blogging website, or social media that you use often? If so, keep those pages interconnected by using the same conversational tone (your voice), colors and images, and layers of professionalism. That way, this becomes the brand that lets readers know they’re viewing something you wrote, even if they don’t realize they’re on your site.
3. Build content strategically.  Those online sites will get natural audiences through your research and academic connections. But you can bring in organic traffic by increasing your content. Post your URLs on your Impactio profile and institution’s website to gain your network connections, then use the content you create to bring in new viewers.
4. Apply for speaking presentations. The coveted role of a guest speaker at an academic conference brings a myriad of benefits with it. Yes, it’s more work, and yes, you have to be (or become) comfortable as a public speaker. However, the advantages you get from your short time in front of an audience will last the rest of your career. Prove yourself competent and effective as a presenter in smaller engagements, and you’ll gradually be invited to speak at more impactful conferences and seminars. Your brand will be that professionalism that you show, and you can add every engagement you speak at to your Impactio profile to attract potential funders and collaboration requests.
5. Collaborate with other authors. If guest speaking isn’t in the cards for you quite yet, you can still build your brand by becoming a guest writer. This is done multiple ways. Work with colleagues and peers who have an academic blog and could use more content to bring in organic traffic, as mentioned earlier. Or, complete collaborative research as a team. By working together, you all share the byline, with one main author. You don’t have to put in a lot of work on these side projects, so you’ll still have time to focus on a main publication. However, all the publicity that comes with each collaborative work you engage in also appears under your brand. 

Tie all of these tips together with your Impactio profile, where your brand and published work’s influence can be easily seen by academic professionals like you around the world.