Self-marketing brand skills for business students

Purpose – Despite the widespread interest in self-marketing, scant research has been published about students’ self-marketing skills. The purpose of this paper is to address this research gap and develop a framework for self-marketing brand skills specific to business students. Design/methodology/approach – Aaker’s Brand Identity Planning Model (2002) was used to construct personal-brand-identity elements. Empirical data were gathered from interviews with 17 students from two business schools in Finland, who were selected using a snowballing sampling technique. Findings – Branding-related elements, together with empirically grounded themes, emerged and were developed into a framework for developing self-marketing brand skills. Self-marketing brand core, self-marketing brand goals and self-marketing brand activities were suggested and further divided into sub-topics, becoming the content of the new framework. Research limitations/implications – The study provides a starting point for further research on self-marketing skills from a branding perspective. Practical implications – The paper discusses several important practical implications for business students who wish to improve their job-seeking success. Originality/value – Rather than adopting a knowledge or activity perspective on self-marketing skills in job searching, the study extends the current knowledge by taking a complementary view, i.e. a branding perspective, and highlights students’ mental preparedness and drive.