The Growth Of Personal Branding In Ghana: Motivations And Practices

ABSTRACT

Personal branding is gradually gaining attention in Ghana as various business executives, job seekers, celebrities and politicians apply the concept to their career and political lives. The knowledge of this concept is, however, heavily informed by self-help materials written and produced by non-academic writers and so-called experts on the topic. Empirical studies in this area of branding are lacking. This study uses interview data from people in the management teams of five famous Ghanaian celebrities, to tease out the motivations for building and managing a personal brand, as well as the strategies and resources that are applied while practicing this relatively novel concept in Ghana. The results suggested that celebrities in Ghana manage personal brands for marketing reasons. They viewed their identity as commodities that could bring them both social and economic returns. The research also identified that the practice of personal branding took a multidisciplinary approach and was not solely based on marketing principles as proposed by some advocates; 1) the processes involved in managing the brand, as applied by these five celebrities, mirrored the corporate branding process used by organisations to manage their reputation, 2) the inputs and resources applied to this concept where informed by Ervin Goffman’s theory of self-presentation.