You are not a Brand. The Personal Branding Myth
In a world of AI and automation, employers are looking for human beings. Which are you going to be a brand or a person?
"Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth"
When working with clients and students I often get asked “How should I develop my personal brand?” at which point I dismiss the whole premise before answering the question. At some point in western civilization, likely the Reagan era 80s, we collectively accepted the idea that everything must have some kind of commodifiable value, and that without this label the object of discussion is inherently not valuable, or rather, non-valuable. This phenomena began to seed in people’s psyche as “I must have an identifiable uniqueness and personal brand in order to be of value.” Commercial branding has been around since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Its original purpose, long before the Industrial revolution, was to mark products and services as a form of ownership by the object creator or service provider. Creative branding began shortly after to make said products and services more appealing for consumer purchase. Inherently the two became conflating ideas, where some people mistake branding as mere creative advertising and a good logo, while others insist that branding has a deeper meaning and that they are meant to identify with the core values of the product or service represented by its ownership.
Today, most corporate brands are not necessarily represented by their initial core values or embodied by the people operating said brand. How can they be? How can a company like Wendy’s (the famous hamburger franchise) embody the same values today as it did in 1969 when founded by entrepreneur and philanthropist Dave Thomas. Today Wendy’s is owned by multi billion dollar global conglomerates including investment and asset management firm Blackrock, which has been under global scrutiny for its funding and investment in arms and weapons manufacturing. What does weapons distribution have anything to do with hamburgers? How is that representative of the Wendy’s brand? You know, the redheaded pigtail girl giving you a soft smile. Ownership is the key takeaway here, in that branding has moved away from its initial purpose and has taken a life of its own, so far removed from itself that it might as well just be a logo.
The same conflated and misunderstood definition of branding has been implanted in the minds of the many and has since taken an ugly turn for the worse, where people don’t feel like they can be themselves without some kind of a brand, or even worse, a logo. Falling for the tragic and sinister exploit of feeling inherently worthless if one does not have a ‘personal brand’. People I work with, especially younger people, have fallen into this trap hard. They can’t just be ‘John Doe: The number 1 Realtor in Canada”; they now have to be ‘John Da #1 Realtor Man’. Yet, what made John Doe the number 1 realtor in Canada was, believe it or not, John Doe the person, long before John Da Man. Layering on more labels on top of who you are, only makes you less visible. It replaces your identity and core values with an avatar that removes the essence of what made it successful in the first place. You risk reducing yourself to a lifeless logo so far removed from its original value. You’re no longer Dave Thomas, the founder of a classic American burger franchise, you sold that delicious burger essence to some abstract group of identities that now distributes weapons globally.
Are you a Human or a Logo?
Retaining and owning who you are, your strengths, weaknesses, core values, skills and expertise uniquely should be your priority. Your brand is the name that your family and friends call you by everyday. Your logo and colour scheme is your style in which you represent and carry yourself by. This is especially true when career hunting today in the world of AI and automation. The more companies look to embrace AI in the workforce, the less human opportunities available. So when you see a job posting today, know that posting is specifically looking for a human being, because that role can’t be filled for whatever reason by AI or automation; and nothing says ‘I am not a human being’ like John Da #1 Realtor Man. You need to represent yourself as a real authentic human being, capable of great success and vulnerable to failure, lessons and growth. Companies are not hiring companies, they are hiring people and people are brands. People are organic, they have chemistry and are able to link seamlessly in other organic groups, like work teams. Somehow I doubt that ‘John Da #1 Realtor Man’ can work cooperatively with the ‘#2 realtor man’ on a group project. Relationships are built by people within brands, not the brands themselves.
I often draw parallels between career building and dating (relationship building). Think about it like this. When dating, the less authentically you represent yourself, the more likely the relationship will not work out. If you present yourself with all the labels that you have come to identify yourself with, as opposed to the person who you genuinely are, either the other person will see through the facade and not pursue a relationship, or worse, they will buy your sales pitch and colourful branding, only to be dissatisfied a few years into the relationship and walking away. Either way you will be left alone wondering who you are anymore, because you can’t tell yourself apart from your ‘personal brand’. The more authentically you show up to a date, flaws and all, the more likely you are to net a relationship. Now replace all the above concepts of ‘dating’ and ‘relationship’ with ‘job interview’ and ‘being employed’.
I’ve worked with a lot of content creators and have had the privilege to work with some of the biggest names in gaming like Tyson ‘TenZ’ Ngo and Zachary “zekken” Patrone. I’ve seen many creators rise to celebrity status and even more fall to oblivion. In the world of social media and content creation, the idea of personal branding is strong for a myriad of reasons from personal merchandising, to SEO, to viral marketing, and all justifiably so. For commercial reasons, having a cool logo, a catchphrase, and content style is essential. Many content creators owe their commercial success to those items, having successfully acquired major sponsorship and partnerships with some of the biggest brands in the world. Yet, the ‘acquisition’ of a brand partnership is not the same as ‘successful’ brand partnership. In fact, I’ve watched more brand partnerships fail than succeed. That’s because if you’re good at sales, you can sell any content creator (person) to a brand, but the relationship begins to break, once the brand sees through the cracks of a cool logo and understands that the strength of the brand is not necessarily as strong as the person underneath it. Just like our ‘dating’ story explained earlier.
We cheer for a sport team, not because of the logo...
Brands evaluate content creators based on their content, delivery strength and brand power. The last of which is perhaps the most important modern marketing teams. Brand power is simply your ability to use your brand to draw as much attention in the form of engagement to a topic as possible. The more brand power, the more dopamine spikes for executive management as they see numbers climb on a chart. Yet, good Marketing specialists understand that data, and traction does not necessarily convert to sales. More often than not, content creators fail to meet the expectations of a brand partnership. This is because the brand falsely equivocated the content creator’s brand with the actual content creator themselves. They fell for the trap thinking that this partnership with this famous content creator will be a smash hit, because numbers on a spreadsheet says so. Later, during the activation the truth gets revealed when the content creator is not authentically able to deliver the partnership requirements, because they, as a person, weren’t authentically represented at the beginning of the relationship, their brand was. The partnership begins to sour and the partnership ends. Yet again, just like our ‘dating’ story explained earlier.
If you actively follow content creators like Twitch streamers, Instagram influencers, YouTubers, TikTokers and the rest, you’d notice that the creators’ most authentic voice comes through when they are engaged in chat or in the comment section. We try to be authentically expressive when we, as individuals, are engaged in conversation. The labels that some carry as ‘brands’ only serve as masks through which authenticity is filtered out from. People consume content from content creators because they can relate to and identify with the creator and not the brand they represent. Many gamers know Byron ‘Reckful’ Bernstein as a famous World of Warcraft content creator and Twitch streamer. But those who actively followed his channels, knew him to be a deeply scarred individual, who suffered with lifelong depression, that he would eventually succumb to by taking his own life. His live therapy sessions with the famous gamer psychologist Dr.K (Healthy Gamer) personalized him. Those who knew his story, already knew, but those just tuning in, were gifted to see a human being, perfect with light and darkness. Reckful, the streamer and Esports pro, became Byron Bernstein as the brand mask slipped off.
We cheer for sports teams not because of the logo, but because of our affinities and attachments to the stories behind the brand. The brand is only an image, a symbol, subjectively worth both everything and nothing, depending on who you ask. Similarly a flag doesn’t represent a country, it represents the ideals which that country upholds. If you’re waving a flag without aligning with the values that it represents, then you might as well grab a burger at ‘Blackrock’ instead of Wendy’s. When you seek out to make relationships, be they personal or professional, aim to show up as authentically as you possibly can. Show your human nature, strengths & vulnerabilities, and your ability to transcend both by being genuine to who you really are, a human being perfectly imperfect, standing amongst other human beings, and now also robots with ‘personal branding’.
You are A Human Being, Not A Brand!!
My philosophy
