For the longest time, I struggled with this strange will I/won’t I with the idea of personal branding. As someone who cosplays as a marketer of some experience I had been conditioned over my entire career that the performance of marketing should extend to your own persona. That you should know yourself well enough to write a brief, write a plan and follow through with the act. What you do for your clients or the company you work for should extend to you. You are a product to be sold and traded for profit, your own, in this case. That profit would in theory first materialize on reputation that would ultimately translate into more clients, better jobs, i.e. revenue, success, et al.
I’ve come to terms with the idea that this is a distraction, that the skillset required to individually market yourself is a factor of publicity and not marketing and that obsessing over your own personal brand would make you a better spokesperson than a marketer. We seem to be the only industry that puts a premium on the self in this way, self-defined first: marketers vie for attention for a living so naturally I assumed we were all bound by competition in the only way we understand. The world of marketing reputation is a zero sum game, where the brand wins over contribution or value. Unfortunately for us, the only thing that’s resulted in is a competitive spirit intent on comparison. We’ve taken everything we’ve learnt from writing briefs, defining personas, positioning, etc and tried to distill it in the form of individuals in order to best position ourselves against others like us. Marketers are a commodity, brand is the differentiator.
Yes, writing a blog post about the futility of personal branding is itself a small act of personal branding. I’m aware. There may be no clean way to discuss the performance without briefly performing it.
An important distinction I’d like to make is that this is not a tirade against creators. As I see it, opinion of one here, creators seek to add value, entertainment or connection first which then shapes the perception built around them. The best creators don’t seek to self define they just start and evolve more organically, so does their perception. You are what you contribute, I see value in this and I think there’s an important difference between the professional value creator and those who are vacuously trying to create an audience to present themselves just as influential without adding value.
Back to the crux. The way I’ve seen this materialize for most people in this space, and those adjacent, comes for the most part in a few well defined flavors:
News & Updates: You don’t really care about the substance of the news themselves but feel compelled to consume and report to appear as in-the-know. God forbid someone ask you what you think.
Commentary: This being the act of opining on someone else’s work (I was particularly guilty of this earlier in my career) usually without access to the context or the experience of doing that kind of work in the first place that would allow you to to access a material insight. It pays to be a hater.
Anecdotes: At best, you have a really good story to tell. At worst, you were part of something a decade ago in a world that doesn’t exist anymore and this is an attempt to make yourself still relevant.
Consider these the 3 ice cream flavors most spots have, you know, vanilla, chocolate and whatever third you think belongs on this list. This is probably what your feeds looks like for the most part. None of these are bad per se, but become bad by become the point onto itself. A little influence recursiveness, attention drives the wrong incentives and once you’re hooked on that attention the incentives then the attention becomes the point.
Understanding why we got here as an industry is somewhat important because it means we’re spending a lot of energy on this stuff vs focusing on the actual work or act of delivering something worth talking about. I used to say I’d let my work do the talking but after seeing people with brands get jobs I wanted, seeing enough work that I wanted to do over time I also fell for it. Well, maybe not fully, since I’ve always been uncomfortable with the idea and this wasn’t enough to stop me fully. I think I was more frustrated that all the effort I was putting into doing good work didn’t seem to fully materialize like it was for others. I was jealous, it sucked. I know think that’s actually what happened in this pocket universe, a sort of recursive self fulfilling prophecy: you do the work while other people talk about it, the minority of people who talk about it get to seemingly get the jobs you want and you’re stuck.
But I was wrong, I was the problem, the problem was me. I was looking for the wrong thing in the wrong place: I was looking at a loud vocal minority be “successful” vs everyone else quietly doing good work. I was jealous of good work not success but I had come to equate both. I felt, maybe I still feel, dumb about it.
Is this a dig at the personal branding crowd? Maybe? I’m not sure, I don’t think I started writing this targeting anyone specifically. There’s a market clearly for this sort of thing so more power to you if this is your beat. I’m just uncomfortable with this being the only way forward for most, it’s exhausting and distracting us from having real conversations and understanding what value we bring to the table as an industry.
So maybe indulge me in being a contrarian here. It does not need to be like this. If you are more than your job, you are more than your opinions about your job, more than the news, more than most of it. What a novel idea, we are not defined by what we do but who we are. The idea you have to expend all of your available energy to differentiate yourself through increasingly meaningless ways doesn’t make you more hirable or more successful. It’s the prestige but a shitty magic trick, you may trick the next few audiences but eventually the audience stops showing up.
In the grand cacophony of things, look at the people who are genuinely enjoying what they’re doing and not thinking about a content calendar in pursuit of an invisible goal. Work can be rewarding enough if you let it but if you let it be the only thing occupying your mind and time there will be little to show for at the end. There’s a certain mystique to the illusion, I get the siren song, but I’ll ask you ask yourself if that time spent methodically examining every second of your professional life is actually paying off or if your pursuit for the next thing is just that, a pursuit. An endless one, yikes.
We dehumanize ourselves a little bit every time we perform, like actors swallowed whole by roles we get paid to play, as if the next performance of a different show was playing the same character. It doesn’t work, you, Odysseus in the Minecraft movie. Out of place, out of time, tonally wrong for the thing. There’s some beauty in the seasonality of your career, you’re up, you’re down. You do amazing shit and suddenly you’re hopeless doing the most mind numbing work you’ve ever done.
Pretending your professional life is nothing but upwards momentum you can fully control is a disappointing all around life. A personal brand can’t admit that a career, a life, is full of highlights and lowlights. Sometimes the work works, sometimes it doesn’t or you’re doing things you care one day to do something you hate the next.
Performing requires confident perseverance: relevant, ascendant, always arriving somewhere important. That’s not a life, it’s a veneer, a fragile substitute for the real thing.
bye!