Building Your Personal Brand​

For any athlete, building a strong personal brand is an important step to creating a long and successful career on and off the field. Your personal brand is one of the most powerful tools for accessing your targeted market. It determines how you’re perceived by fans, sponsors, businesses, and the professional sports world, how they remember and recognize you.

Building your brand can be a difficult task, largely because there is a high level of competition, especially in Ireland where you have a small population and a relatively small pool of professional athletes. It can be hard for any athlete to stand out from the crowd and successfully scale your own brand. Additionally, there are numerous parts involved in building a personal brand, in a world where you are under so much scrutiny for your actions, and in such a competitive space you have to be aware of the message you portray with your actions and your words.

In every industry, branding is extremely important (not only in the sports marketing industry). The reason it’s so important for every athlete or candidate is that naturally, people will have a preconceived idea of your character solely based on your athletic career or profile. The public rides the wave with you during your career, listening to every word in interviews and seeing how you handle yourself. This can become a natural portfolio for you to take to businesses in the future as saying the right thing under that pressure is a good sign of being able to handle what might come in the workplace.

A good branding strategy can help you establish a relationship with your audience, connect and communicate with fans, attract potential sponsors, and more. This is success and recognition that you can use to capitalize on for your current or future career endeavours, like starting a business after retirement or joining a business venture.

As a professional or elite athlete in Ireland, you’ll make the most of your money from endorsement deals and partnerships, especially here in Ireland where the financial gain from many of our top sports are not professional. While your contract will always be your main source of income it is important to keep your options open to new potential partnership deals and any new business ventures.

When you take the time to develop your personal brand, it’s much easier for businesses to align themselves with you. For example, if you find a business or start-up that shares the same values with you, they can become an opportunity for a symbiotic growth. Although money can be the primary motivation, another reason to cultivate a strong personal brand is because of your influence on others. Whether you’re trying to be or not, you are a role model to people. You want to make sure that you have full control of how others see you – this should not be a decision that is taken by someone else.

Having a resilient personal brand can help you succeed well into retirement. A sporting career can be short-lived in the grand scheme of things, but you can have upwards of twenty to thirty years in a new industry. Naturally, having grown a strong personal brand throughout your career will stand to you going forward into new ventures.

A sporting career can without a doubt open doors and opportunities that other candidates might not, it is important to be able to take advantage of these and make sure you are leaving yourself in a strong position for when your career might be coming towards an end.

The team at MA Sports have seen it all within the Irish sporting landscape and understands exactly what you need to help build your brand for your career. We have worked with Athletes in a variety of sports and know exactly what it takes to build for the future and plan ahead.

If you are thinking of building your brand, assessing your options, or looking to see what the landscape of the Irish market is, or need any advice on what your next steps should be please feel free to reach out at the below.

Want to talk about MA Sports? Contact: z.deboe@masonalexander.ie