Kazimir.ai
I remember the first Political Marketing class I attended as part of my Marketing & Advertising degree back in the 90s. It was a lecture by a top Creative Director, and the students were busy asking questions and filling out their notebooks, captivated by the world of possibilities being presented to them. As for me, I was simply sitting there, baffled: "Wait, what? Are you saying I can apply the same tactics to sell a cereal box and a human being?"
I could not fathom why a person would want to be reduced to the same level as an inanimate object and be subjected to the 4 Marketing Ps: Product, Price, Promotion, and Place. We are human beings, after all! A cereal box is a dull, inert, soulless thing, waiting for a creative mind to make something out of it. A human, on the other hand, is an individual with a unique soul, story, and set of skills. A complex and multifaceted being, filled with an array of emotions and holding the potential for good and evil, selfishness and altruism. A cereal has no inherent trait, so it can be packaged and branded as the perfect product to "Bring out the tiger in you". To mold a person into a brand means to conceal one's soul and create an image that suits other people's expectations, needs, and desires. To my 20-year-old, that sounded dehumanizing and terrifying, so I told myself that personal branding would be used only by politicians, people who had already sold their souls for power anyway. The world would be okay, so I thought!
The Age of Personal Branding
Fast forward a few decades and ordinary people started talking about creating their personal brand—their digital persona. In the nascent digital world, the so-called influencers needed a way to break through the social media noise and grab people's attention to achieve their goal of monetizing.
Social media turned people into the product, and since we're already a product, let us at least grab our share of this new revenue stream and the instant fame that comes with it. Marketers were there to help! Marketing agencies started surfing on the digital wave and applying their magic to help influencers brand themselves while matching them with companies, which were still learning how to deal with the rapid behavioral changes of their new digital consumers. From there, it didn't take long for us to reach The Age of the Personal Brand, where anyone, anywhere can apply market logic and corporate strategy to create their own identity and craft their brand.
Brands Belong to Their Customers
Management guru Tom Peters coined the phrase "personal brand" in his 1997 article "The Brand Called YOU" published in the Fast Company magazine. In that article, Peters argued that personal branding offered an exciting and empowering personal escape from corporate rule:
"You're not an "employee" of General Motors, you're not a "staffer" at General Mills, you're not a "worker" at General Electric or a "human resource" at General Dynamics (ooops, it's gone!). Forget the Generals! You don't "belong to" any company for life, and your chief affiliation isn't to any particular "function." You're not defined by your job title and you're not confined by your job description. Starting today you are a brand."
Personal branding is based on the belief that it takes more than a reputation or a good idea to differentiate your value and what you bring to the table. To stand out, you need to create an outstanding personal brand. Just like in the commercial world, a personal brand is intentional. It is how you want people to see you. According to the narrative, your personal brand is about your unique, intrinsic, skills and behaviors that can be identified, packaged, and branded to your advantage. Personal branding is often sold as a way to turn who you are into an asset that you can possess and leverage. But the truth is that personal branding is nothing more than the commoditization of the self.
What Tom Peters didn't disclaim and what most don't realize is that a brand does not belong to itself. A brand belongs to its customers. A brand only exists to satisfy its customers' needs, and, to do so, it must meet their expectations. Adaptability (being able to adapt to business and customer changes) is what sets successful businesses apart from failed enterprises. When Nike's external environment or audience changes, Nike changes.
The brand has no "self" to contend with. It answers only to sales. When people become brands, they stop answering to themselves and start answering to others (to what sells). Our Age of the Personal Brand is a world of people shaping their selves around what sells. To build a successful personal brand, you have to be willing to pursue the most profitable idea, rather than your most original idea or the one you are passionate about. This is where self-branding slowly erases the self.
You think you are free, empowered, the owner of your own "self". But the truth is that you've traded your soul to become a commodity, all the while placing your "self" in the hands of others—your customers, your followers, your readers. The more your audience grows, the more it feels like you're required to live up to their expectations about how you should show up and what you should share on social media and digital platforms. Like any product, you now exist to meet other people's expectations, needs, and desires. A well-crafted brand strategy will surely bring you recognition and revenue, but any shift in the external environment will require you to make changes to the product—your own "self". Your mind may be "free" to roam, but your internal brand manager is constantly policing you, ensuring you stay safely inside the bounds of what's sellable. In the long run, this will ultimately kill your authenticity.
Authenticity Is a Rarity
Our modern brand culture has replaced authenticity with image.
Traditional branding works by crafting an image of a flawless and consistent product. Humans don't work that way. We are complex, contradictory, and fallible. Authenticity requires embracing the flaws and inherent contradictions of the human condition. Many times, authenticity requires going against the crowd. When you live authentically, you don't worry about what you say (or didn't say) and how you act, because you trust yourself and your motivations implicitly. But if you are a brand, crafted for perfection and consistency, and existing to meet other people's expectations, then authenticity becomes impossible.
The argument for personal branding is that you already wear masks for all the different roles you play—parent, professional, friend, etc... - so you are not concealing your true self but only showing a different side of yourself. Although we indeed play multiple roles in our lives, our authentic flawed selves still shine behind the masks we tend to wear. Personal branding doesn't allow for that because the most fundamental thing about branding is the intention and effort put into crafting the perfect image. Branding is about intentionally putting effort into maintaining a consistent and flawless image throughout every interaction a consumer has with your brand. Living and working this way is tiring, dispiriting, and confining.
To craft a personal brand is to hide your soul by putting on a mask that conceals your shadow, and suits the image others should have of you. Instead of fully realizing your true potential by letting your authentic self shine through, you place the power of deciding who you shall be in the hands of others.
Human beings are not products that can be manufactured to behave in a prescribed way and then branded for profit and recognition. We're unpredictable free agents, overflowing with creativity, spontaneity, and contradictions. Why try and package us to all be the same? In doing so, we miss out on the intangible value of being individuals.
The world doesn't need more cereal boxes or branded commodities. The world needs authentic people, embodied with strengths and weaknesses, joy and pain, selfishness and altruism. People with the creative power to be a catalyst for change in the world, while keeping their souls off the market.
How true is what you brought forth in this article, Carol. I do agree that the Personal Branding world has been exhausting us humans. I wish that we could pay less attention to fit ourselves into boxes and instead just celebrate our uniqueness without really having to worry about of being accepted or sellable. How can we live in a world where the goal is not a financial gain or profit?
Living these days lost the flavor of surprise of the other.... not really knowing people fully and living with the mystery of the other person to slowly enjoy discoveries and the unfolding of the other human.
Thank you for bringing this up. As I continue to build my small business and personal branding is so important, your article is really a great reminder that I am not what I do or even what I have to offer, but I am a package of mystery, full of gifts and flaws and I am someone who deeply inside just want to contribute during my time on this planet.