Karen Kang

Karen Kang (BrandingPays.com) is a recognized brand strategist and the CEO and founder of BrandingPays, a corporate and personal branding company. She has trained thousands of professionals on the unique BrandingPaysTM System for personal branding. For the first time, Kang makes her signature method available to a mass market with BrandingPays: The Five-Step System to Reinvent Your Personal Brand. Readers will learn how to apply her "Bake the Cake, then Ice It" metaphor to reinvent their personal brands for today's world. The book includes templates, charts, action lists, and inspiring stories - many from under-represented groups in top business leadership - to help professionals, entrepreneurs, and college students develop their own recipes for successful branding. Kang, who has more than 20 years of experience in brand strategy consulting, was a partner with Regis McKenna Inc., the legendary marketing firm that created and launched the Apple brand. She has consulted to more than 150 organizations in the US, Europe and Asia from Fortune 100 companies to non-profits and startups. Her broad experience has included such diverse clients as Ariba, AstraZeneca, AT&T, Genentech, HP, Lavante, Synopsys, Maxtor, NCR, Park Systems, UC Davis Health System and Webroot. Her marketing and communications background gives her a 360-degree view of branding. A former newspaper journalist on both the East and West Coasts, she has held executive positions in marketing consulting, advertising and public relations firms. Kang is a frequent speaker at leading business schools and professional organizations. She has served on the boards of The Friends of the Palo Alto Library and the Women's Technology Cluster (Astia). She has also donated her time to such worthy non-profit organizations as Girls for a Change, CORO, Asian Business League of San Francisco, National Association of Asian American Professionals and Ascend. She is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Mills College, where she holds her B.A. degree in English, and has earned her M.S. degree in Journalism from Boston University.