The Female Brand: Using The Female Mindset To Succeed In Business

The Female Brand is a how-to and how-to-think book for women of all ages who want to create more success, fulfillment, or options. We’re all familiar with the numbers: Women make up 51 percent of the work-force, yet even today, in 2008, more than forty years after the feminist revolution rocked the country, only a paltry 2 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are women.

The Female Brand will provide new insights into why it’s different for women in the workplace, how to tap into the aptitudes we’re wired for as women, and why playing our game the way men play their game usually backfires. We need to lead with our XX chromosomes!

This book is a high-octane guide for women who want to avoid getting stuck and who want to build a powerful self-brand, network, and confidence—a guide to thriving in today’s male-dominated but soon-to-be-female-dominated workplace.

About the Author

The belief that we can recreate ourselves to fit our dreams is a deeply American idea, one that Catherine Kaputa’s own life reflects. Catherine began her career as a Japanese art historian at the Seattle Art Museum, and later worked on a Ph.D. at Harvard University. She experienced her first personal branding crisis when she decided that “Japanese art historian” wasn’t her brand, even though she had invested two years studying in Japan at Tokyo University and had translated a book from Japanese.

Catherine came to New York to rebrand herself to work in marketing and communications—a difficult transition given the profound differences between the academic and commercial worlds. Persistence led her to branding pioneers Al Ries and Jack Trout at Trout & Ries Advertising, who decided to take a chance on her. Later, Catherine worked at Wells, Rich, Greene as the Management Supervisor on the I (Heart) New York account. She gained valuable experience supervising the TV commercials featuring Broadway musicals and celebrities, which received numerous creative awards.

Interested in expanding her portfolio of experience by working from the client’s side, Catherine moved to Wall Street, where she was Senior Vice President, Director of Advertising and Community Affairs at Shear-son Lehman Brothers and later Citi Smith Barney for more than ten years.

As Catherine was taking her son to preschool on September 11, 2001, the two towers of the World Trade Center fell down, four blocks from where she worked. She then decided to start her own business as a personal branding and career coach. She also began teaching at New York University’s Stern School of Business.

Catherine decided to share the techniques she developed as a career consultant. The result was the book, U R a Brand! How Smart People Brand Themselves for Business Success, winner of the Ben Franklin award for best career book 2007 and a bronze IPPY award.

Catherine developed speaking presentations for women’s business organizations, she identified a need for more analysis of the unique career challenges women face in the workplace. In response, she wrote The Female Brand: Using the Female Mindset to Succeed in Business.