Interlude: Personal Branding

Before Part Two of my previous post, I wanted to write something about personal branding. “Nowadays, it’s all about personal branding”. This sentence expresses a well-known idea in marketing circles. Personal branding is basically building a professional image that makes you attractive for companies or potential customers (if you are a consultant, for example). The other day I had a conversation about personal branding, and I was thinking about the consequences of this phenomenon. On the one hand, the job market seems to push us in the direction of personal branding. Good personal branding means visibility and reputation, and it comes with a whole set of perks that are difficult to ignore. For instance, your personal branding can land you a higher-paying job or more valuable customers. And, in fact, personal branding can eventually become a powerful force in the consumer market as more and more consumers build their own brand.

In the interview, Martin Lindstrom ventures the opinion that personal branding can put consumers in very different positions in the market. He says that personal branding will eventually determine how much you are charged for a product in brick and mortar stores. So, for instance, if you walk into an Adidas store to buy a Real Madrid shirt, you will have to pay more for the shirt than another customer with a more reputable personal brand than yours. The idea is that in such a case, Adidas will prefer the person with the strongest brand, as the association of the shirt with him/her can lead to additional sales. Personal branding, then, has some perks and, in the future, this can become even more tangible than now.

On the other hand, personal branding seems to be an ego-driven activity. Even if you do it for instrumental purposes (like getting a job), personal branding is built by turning your attention towards yourself, and the ways you can distinguish yourself from others (just like a product, you need some special attribute, so-called point of difference, if you want to stand out from the crowd). And this can be a bad idea, psychologically speaking. A favorite place where personal branding is embodied is social media. And it turns out that social media use, and the comparisons that come with it, can be psychologically damaging. If we are constantly comparing ourselves to others (and, especially, with images they have carefully crafted) we will feel worse and worse.

So, what should we do?  Should we go for it and build a brand of ourselves or abandon the entire enterprise to safeguard our mental health? I do not know. I am sometimes inclined towards the second alternative, but the fact of posting this entry makes me think that either I am of two minds about this or do not find the prospect of contradicting myself performatively aversive.