NEWSLETTERS FOR BUSINESS
SENZA Hotel
THE LEARNING CURVE — JUNE 22, 2022
Don’t fall into the personal brand trap
Brands manufacture meaning through consensus; people must strive to create their own.
Credit: Brooke Lark / Unsplash
KEY TAKEAWAYS
The personal brand has proven a popular career prescription since the
1990s. Brand designer Debbie Millman argues that the concept of personal
branding is self-contradictory. Rather than building a personal brand, you
should focus on developing your capabilities, relationships, and sense of
authenticity.
Don't fall into the personal brand trap
Kevin Dickinson
The first brands, such as religious
icons and national flags, were created
by communities to signal a shared
identity. (Credit: Furkanvari/Pexels)
Though the logo has changed over the
years, McDonald’s has always
signaled its brand to be family-
friendly and unpretentious. (Credit:
Heroshe/Adobe Stock)
RELATED
CAREER DEVELOPMENT
Reinvention 101: How to
build your personal brand
Everyone has a vague idea of what a
corporate brand is. Disney has its
swoopy signature logo. Apple is
about innovative thinking. State
Farm has its catchy jingle. And
Reese’s Peanut Butter […]
UP NEXT
THINKING
Why changing your mind is a feature
of evolution, not a bug
If argumentation led to nothing, it would soon be thrown into the evolutionary dustbin.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
FROM THE WEB
EasySolar
New York Will Cover Cost to Install
Solar if You Own a Home in These…
Zips
Find out if you qualify. Get your free quote today!
Big Think
Why You Shouldn't Compromise on
Sex
FROM THE WEB
Investing Magazine
Beckham Marries The Richest
Heiress In The World
MEMBERSHIP
Book Now
Napa, United States From $319
00:10 1x
I
t’s not unusual for corporate memes to leak into everyday
use. Perhaps you’ve noticed an influx of “ninjas,” “mavens,”
and “gurus” populating your social networks as of late? But
one meme that has taken a powerful hold in our culture is the
“personal brand.”
TOP STORIES
This brand-centered mindset, as summarized by Tom Peters,
charges that: “Regardless of age, regardless of position, regardless
of the business we happen to be in, all of us need to understand
the importance of branding. We are CEOs of our own companies:
Me Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be
head marketer for the brand called You.”
While the concept has its roots in the 1990s, at that time, it was
mostly relegated to executive circles and the occasional celebrity’s
fall from grace. With the internet and social media, the personal
brand transformed from a niche idea to social wildfire.
Suddenly, we weren’t performing jobs but curating the
experience of us. We weren’t professionals building relationships
but influencers appealing to followers for likes and retweets. We
weren’t even hobbyists anymore but side hustlers looking for
extra income and social sway in the gig economy.
But there’s a problem with this mindset, argues educator and
brand designer Debbie Millman. Namely, personal brands are
oxymoronic. You can’t be a brand and live your life as a person
because the two have different goals. And trying to fit yourself into
this contradictory state can make success or a good life — in
whatever forms those may take for you — difficult to achieve.
A branded history of the world
Perhaps the oldest (and most literal) form of brand marketing as
we’d recognize it today dates back to 2700 BC. The ancient
Egyptians would use bronze branding irons to scar their livestock
with symbols. These symbols represented ownership over an
animal in case it was lost or stolen.
FEATURED VIDEOS
We’re in a mass depression. Can spirituality help? | Lisa Miller
Anxiety evolved to help
us — what went wrong?
A neuroscientist...
We’re in a mass
depression. Can
spirituality help? | Lisa...
The beauty of collective
intelligence, explained
by a developmental...
03:10 09:01
If you think about it, it’s not much different than Nike branding
your sneakers with its iconic swoosh to show its ownership of the
design. In fact, the word brand comes to us from the Old English
brond, meaning “fire or flame.”
With that said, Millman pushes the history of brands back even
further. She makes the case that the progenitors of modern brands
appeared 10,000 years ago during the Neolithic Revolution. At
that time, our ancestors began using religious symbols and rituals
to communicate their beliefs and distinguish them from the
beliefs of others.
Whenever the date is set, brands soon spread beyond sheep and
shrines to mark just about everything we make and experience.
Ancient Greek merchants branded wine amphoras as a seal of not
only ownership but also quality and reputation. After the Sung
dynasty invented block printing, signboards, advertisements, and
brand-specific packaging soon followed.
Ad
Every Day is a New Day
Norwegian Cruise Line
But things really took off in the 18th century with the advent of
trademarks and the Industrial Revolution. Soon after, logos
became a ubiquitous means of differentiating one similar mass-
produced good from another. Advertising agencies cropped up to
sell attention and loyalty to their clients. And technologies
provided ever new ways to deliver on-brand messaging.
Today, brands are an inescapable part of life. Shoes, sugar, soul
music, sports teams, and space travel are all defined by brands.
Even water, one of the most abundant resources on the planet, is
distributed internationally through more than 100 different
brands — though owned by only a handful of corporations.
The why of brands
This hasty history indicates what Millman argues is the goal of any
brand: to create manufactured meaning around products,
practices, beliefs, or concepts. People then use those brands to
signal their allegiance with, or divergence from, that meaning.
This is as true for a political affiliation (“I Like Ike”) as your video
game console of choice (“Sega does what Nintendon’t”).
“I’m not saying that in a way that disparages this process; it’s
actually a manufactured construction,” Millman said in an
interview. “[But] brands don’t grow on trees. They don’t have any
internal life. They don’t have a consciousness, they don’t bleed.
We create them. We create a series of symbols, of beliefs, of
behaviors, all embedded in this thing that we then call a brand.”
Because brands don’t exist in nature, we construct that meaning
through two traits that any brand must possess: consensus and
consistency.
Consensus here doesn’t mean everyone feels the same way about
a brand. Just ask any self-identified Coke or Pepsi person. Rather,
groups of people instill their brands with meaning as a means to
signal “to others nonverbally who [they] are, what [they] believe,
what is important to [them].” The Star of David, the Buddhist
Dharma wheel, the Christian cross, and the Islamic star and
crescent were all designed by their respective communities as
symbols of identity, social cohesion, and shared values.
Whether we affiliate with one, another, or none signals our
relationship to those communities and their values. That same
drive extends to the cars we buy, the cafés we frequent, and the
logos on our weekend hoodies.
Then there’s consistency. If a brand holds one meaning today and
an entirely different one tomorrow, people won’t be able to
maintain the sense of cohesion and shared identity that drew
them to that brand in the first place.
“The only people that really like brand changes are brand
designers and brand managers – that’s it. There’s no consumer
that has ever gone to a shelf, seen that their brand has changed
and been excited,” Millman said.
This is why so many corporations have brand handbooks and
spend millions to protect their brand architecture. It’s why the
religious orthodoxy does not tolerate beliefs it deems heretical,
and why conflict in a political party often leads to schisms.
Consistency may seem more a luxury than a necessity given the
longevity of brands like McDonald’s. But the fast-food chain has
always promoted itself as a family-friendly, feel-good, and
unpretentious brand. What’s changed has been the way the
company markets that meaning through its design (its logo,
commercials, offerings, and so on).
Its many rebrandings haven’t been a way to alter its meaning;
they’ve been a means to retain that meaning among the currents
of our ever-shifting culture.
The personal brand trap
These traits make brands useful for corporations, political parties,
and ancient Egyptian ranchers, but they are stifling for people.
This is the crux of Millman’s dislike of the personal brand
concept.
As she told The New York Times: “But to be a brand takes all of the
sort of glorious humanity out of being human. You become this
manufactured thing. And all the things that are so wonderful
about being human, changing our minds, being messy, being
inconsistent, all of those things are the things brands try to avoid
being.”
While you can try to emulate the positive qualities of branding,
the truth is that rulebook wasn’t designed with you in mind.
Brands are static creations, while you must be a dynamic
participant in your life and career. Brands let the consensus of
others dictate their values and meaning, while you must discover
both for yourself. Brands chase consistency by reorienting to
match the expectations of “consumers,” while you must have
reserve room to grow and develop without a sense of self-
fraudulence.
Take the personal-branding prescription too far, and you run the
risk of cementing your identity to the brand. New passions are
unexplored. Fears and struggles must be ignored over concerns of
not being “on brand.” And your life endeavors are filtered through
the lens of marketability rather than the pursuit of their intrinsic
worth.All of which can be counterproductive to your sense of
authenticity. As one meta-analysis found, authenticity had a
positive relationship with both well-being and engagement. But
to achieve that, you must meet yourself as you are today, not who
you were 10 years ago when you settled on your personal brand.
Rethinking personal branding
If we’re stuck with the term personal brand — and it seems we are
— then we can at least shift our understanding to something more
humanizing than “Me Inc.”
Millman’s definition of personal branding is “deliberate
differentiation.” That is, the celebration of your values and skills
paired with your ability to communicate those with enthusiasm
and sincerity. Discovering that can be as messy or inconsistent as
you need it to be. And because differentiation is the key, your
meaning can grow and evolve with you.
Nor is Millman alone in her distrust of personal branding. Guy
Kawasaki, former Apple brand evangelist and founding partner of
Garage Technology Ventures, also worries that people may take
the wrong lessons. To help, he’s developed six guiding principles
to make personal branding something that’s truly personal.
Be genuine
Don’t try to shape yourself to what’s trendy. The qualities that
make you you should be the core of your reputation, career
development, and relationships with others.
Be focused
Be honest about what subjects, industries, or purposes drive you.
Make that and not today’s trends your focus.
Be mindful
You aren’t the same person you were 10 years ago. Why should
your goals be the same as then?
Be open
Look for opportunities to connect with others and share your
passions and expertise. But don’t think we have to be everything
to everyone everywhere.
Be positive
There are already enough jerks, right?
Be willing to fail
Accept that failure happens, learn what lessons you can from it,
and move on.
Colin Kaepernick
@Kaepernick7 · Follow
Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing
everything. #JustDoIt
3:20 PM · Sep 3, 2018
774.5K Reply Share
Read 35.9K replies
Nike lost customers whose values didn’t align with its Colin Kaepernick ad, but it also captured the loyalty of those for
whom the message resonated.
A new era in branding history
None of this is to say that the future of brands won’t be better or
more personal. It’ll just be personal in a different way than the
personal branding gurus and mavens think.
As Millman pointed out in her interview, the next watershed
moment for brands appears to be democratization. Increasingly,
people desire to buy from companies that they feel are ethical and
help to realize their values in the world. That has flipped the Subscribe for counterintuitive,
messaging. Instead of branding being used to signal difference, it’s surprising, and impactful stories
delivered to your inbox every
now used to communicate how the brand makes a difference. Thursday
“[People] want to understand and know that the things that Email
they’re buying are coming from companies whose values and
SUBSCRIBE
whose mission they feel are worthy of contributing to. And that’s a
big sea change and something that we have really never seen
before,” she said.
In other words, the next step in the history of brands isn’t us
becoming brands. It’s making brands better for us.
Learn more on Big Think+
With a diverse library of lessons from the world’s biggest thinkers,
Big Think+ helps businesses get smarter, faster. To access Debbie
Millman’s full class for your organization, request a demo.
Tags
Career Development history Life Hacks psychology
Smart Skills
THE PRESENT THE PRESENT NEUROPSYCH YOUR BRAIN ON MONEY
How is the passion economy Mathematics explains why The neuroscience of How Apple and Nike have
changing the way we look at non-conformists always end branding branded your brain
jobs? up looking alike
A new episode of "Your Brain on Powerful branding can not only
The rules have changed, and so have It’s called the “hipster effect,” and a Money" illuminates the strange change how you feel about a
we. study from Brandeis University world of consumer behavior and company, it can actually change how
mathematician Jonathan Touboul explores how brands can wreak your brain is wired.
▸ 4 min — with Adam Davidson explains how it happens. havoc on our ability to make rational
decisions. ▸ 6 min — with Big Think
FROM THE WEB FROM THE WEB FROM THE WEB
Investing Magazine GoSearches | Search Ads SearchTopics | Search Ads
Guests Didn't Know What To Do At Volvo Offers Major Incentives For Most Affordable Camper Vans
Natalie Portman's Wedding Leftover 2023 Inventory
Big Think Big Think Big Think
Your Refrigerator Has Become Self- Enduring Envy: Jealousy in the 21st Rule 34: Why Technology Has Forced
Aware Century Playboy To Drop Nude Photos
FROM THE WEB FROM THE WEB FROM THE WEB
wrinkles.pro BestSearches | Search Ads SearchTopics | Search Ads
Dermatologist Begs Americans To Options For Your Psoriasis Can Be Electric Wheelchairs & Scooters For
"Fill In" Wrinkles With This Tip… Easier to Get Than You Think Sale
(Every
Forget Retinol,Morning)
Use This Household Item To Fill In Wrinkles
Recommended by
SUBSCRIBE SECTIONS COLUMNS

Get counterintuitive, surprising, and impactful stories Neuropsych Starts With A Bang
delivered to your inbox every Thursday. Thinking The Well
Leadership 13.8
Smart Skills Strange Maps Get Big Think for Your Business. Enable
High Culture The Learning Curve transformation and drive culture at your
Your email address GO The Past
The Present company with lessons from the biggest
The Future VIDEO thinkers in the world.
Life The Big Think Interview
Health Your Brain on Money LEARN MORE →
Hard Science Playlists
FOLLOW US Special Issues Explore the Library
Business

ABOUT The Weekly Crossword

Our Mission
Work With Us
Contact
Privacy Policy
Terms of Use
Accessibility
Careers

© Copyright 2007-2023 & BIG THINK, BIG THINK PLUS, SMARTER FASTER trademarks owned by Freethink Media, Inc. All rights reserved.