eThesis - Kauppakorkeakoulun sähköiset gradut

The situation in the labor market is constantly changing and becoming more challenging for individuals attempting to either get employed or to advance their careers. In many fields the competition has intensified in an unprecedented manner because of difficult economic times and structural changes. Personal branding has been presented as the tool to gain competitive advantage and social media as the main channel for practical implementation.

This study aims to understand how personal branding, the purpose of which is aiding one to advancing his or her career, is carried out in a niche industry where success is arbitrary and education, skills and experience have a lesser effect. Thus, the importance of personal branding on social media should amplify. The fashion industry and models in particular were chosen as the field of interest for the aforementioned reasons, and for the industry's natural incline towards the significance of branding.

The chosen method for empirical research is interviewing. Five semi-structured interviews were conducted face to face with the informants, which include one model agent and four working models who are all in different stages of their career, and who are variously popular in social media. Two interview templates were created; one for the discussion with the model agent and one for the discussions with the models.

Prosperous cobranding arrangements was found as one of the practical benefits models can obtain with the help of personal branding, thus combining personal branding theories with cobranding theories is a key theoretical contribution of this research. A reworked version of Hadjicharalambous' (2013) "Conceptual Framework to Evaluate Cobranding Arrangements" is an example of this contribution.