Karen Kang is a recognized brand strategist and the CEO and founder of BrandingPays LLC, a corporate and personal branding company. She is the author of the best-selling business book, BrandingPays: The Five-Step System to Reinvent Your Personal Brand that has been featured in BusinessWeek, Fast Company and in major TV and radio shows. She has trained thousands of professionals on the unique BrandingPays™ System for personal branding.

She was a principal and partner with Regis McKenna Inc., the legendary marketing firm that created and launched the Apple brand. She's consulted to more than 150 organizations in the U.S., Europe and Asia from Fortune 100 companies to non-profits and startups. Her broad experience has included such diverse clients as Ariba, AT&T, Genentech, HP, iCharts, Lavante, Synopsys, Maxtor, NCR, Park Systems, UC Davis Health System and VoyagePrive.

Karen's 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. Karen 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 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.