Why I Hate the Idea of a Personal Brand
When I moved to southern California in 2013, I briefly considered becoming a social media influencer. Those apps were really taking off around then, and you were starting to see all sorts of bloggers cultivate big enough followings to make serious money from the them. I started doing some research and I discovered two things pretty quickly -
Influencers have to create A TON of content to stay relevant. This alone was enough to turn me off. I love photos but I didn’t want to become obsessed with creating new things all the time.
But the real issue for me was the second thing:
2. Influencers need to define a brand for themselves. Especially when starting out, it’s a crucial piece of building their initial audience. They need to pick a specific market niche that their personality aligned with and then sell the hell out of that one specific piece until they get big enough to possibly expand.
The second idea highlights the idea of a personal brand. A brand is a name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller’s goods or services as distinct from those of other sellers. A personal brand takes that definition and imposes it on oneself.
The idea was first introduced in the late 1930’s but ballooned with the advent of social media and online identities. A personal brand is the idea of packaging one’s ‘uniqueness’ up into a marketable entity, positioning themselves as an authority in their space, elevating their credibility, ultimately for the purpose of advancing in their career or in society.
Lately, you see this idea being encouraged pretty much everywhere. For example, a couple years ago, I was looking into changing jobs and when I looked up advice for getting positions in the field I was interested in, found that around 50% of the advice had to do with branding myself. It advised I make my LinkedIn profile a shrine to that industry, and that I start a blog where I talk about concepts related to that industry. It even recommended I brand my twitter that way as well. FOR A JOB. This was difficult for me to stomach. I already knew that I wasn’t a person who wants to be known by my career alone.
LinkedIn is especially culpable, but most social media rewards the idea of picking a niche and relentlessly promoting yourself within that niche.
I have many problems with this.
First, the idea of packaging one’s ‘uniqueness’ seems to be an oxymoron. People are intensely multifaceted and constantly changing. It is impossible to define a person in just a few words unless they are extremely broad (and job interviews still make us try). For example, if I had to describe myself in three words, I might say I’m disciplined, open-minded, and sincere. Great, so are thousands and thousands of other people in this world. To capture my uniqueness isn’t possible to capture in a brand format. People’s uniqueness is baked into the way they respond to change, and the way all of their myriad of experiences affect their responses in each individual moment. If you truly know a way to package all of that up, please let me know.
Jenny Odell has a great quote on this from her book ‘How to Do Nothing’ “When the language of advertising and personal branding enjoins you to “be yourself,” what it really means is “be more yourself,” where “yourself” is a consistent and recognizable pattern of habits, desires, and drives that can be more easily advertised to and appropriated, like units of capital” (Odell, 2019).*
Second, a brand is usually fixed. When we think of clothing or technology brands, we think of logos and taglines, and a certain look and feel. Apple is a best-in-class case study of this. You always know if you’re handling an Apple product or interacting in an Apple space. It’s also why there are always very mixed responses when a company tries to rebrand. It creates a feeling of instability for consumers. We like knowing what to expect when we go to a certain store.
But the same ends up happening with personal brands. If you brand yourself, you basically have to pick a couple qualities about yourself to hang your brand on and then never change them. For example, we all know now that Paris Hilton acted like a spoiled airhead for decades because it was her brand. People liked it, and it sold well, even though that wasn’t who she really was. And that’s the crux of my issue. Personal branding doesn’t allow for growth or change.
We’ve seen this in action. People like Paris took the safe route. They stuck to their brand and it did well. Even though she may have been suffering internally, she didn’t try to change her image and she didn’t have to face any repercussions of that. But with social media we get to see way more iterations of this. We’ve seen YouTubers who were super popular change their content as their interests develop and they lose their audience. We’ve seen child stars try to take on more adult roles and get punished for it. We’ve seen singers reinvent themselves and garner criticism.
As soon as you brand yourself, you become a fixed entity and people feel entitled to the brand version of you over your real self. I think it’s important to note that ‘brand’ can also mean ‘an identifying mark burned on livestock or former criminals or slaves with a branding iron’. It really sticks with you.
The downside of a personal brand is so large, I have a hard time believing it’s worth the potential success that may result from it. Some people have become massively successful this way, but what happens to them when they start to change?
You might think this only applies to celebrities whose fame and fortune is predicated on this idea, but it can happen to everyone. If you were to market yourself at work as the best person to go to for expertise on the healthcare industry. Guess what? You’ll be the healthcare guy.
By marketing yourself as something you are - you also end up telling people what you’re not. If you know about healthcare and about retail but people only know about your healthcare experience, people may not listen when you want to talk retail. I apologize for this boring white collar job example, but you see my point! If you’re not absolutely sure about the qualities you project you can end up trapped by them.
“Friends, family, and acquaintances can see a person who lives and grows in space and time, but the crowd can only see a figure who is expected to be as monolithic and timeless as a [company] brand” (Odell, 2019)*
The ironic part is that no one wants that to happen to themselves. Every person thinks of themselves as unique, multifaceted, and important. No one wants to have to perform one identity all the time. Furthermore, we change constantly. We change our minds many times in one day even. We learn new things, get exposed to different perspectives and then our ideas and preferences may change. Maybe we develop new hobbies or pivot careers or have major life events occur. Nobody wants to be confined to a past self. When personal growth is encouraged, and change is inevitable, how can we ask others to stick to a personal brand?
Luckily, we seem to be in a period where this idea is in flux. People are recognizing how unfair it is to limit people to a brand, to one version of themselves. However, the economy still encourages it and that sometimes still makes it tough to navigate your career and social space without one. I know I definitely feel stifled by the idea and whenever I see advice about branding myself, I’m immediately turned off. I don’t want to have to stick to one facet of myself, and what’s more? I don’t want to have to market it. I don’t want to package up my personality into units of capital - with some having more ‘value’ than others. Maybe my refusal is holding me back, but I know that I would be many degrees unhappier if I succumbed to the idea. And that’s always the tradeoff - is your potential unhappiness worth the degree of potential success? Only you can answer that for yourself.
*Source info below. This book dives deep into what it means to take a step back from the attention economy. I only touch on the idea of personal branding in this article but it is a wonderful critical exploration of how our attention is currently used, how that spread impacts us, and what we can potentially do about it.
Sources:
Odell, Jenny. (2019). How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Melville House Publishing.
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