I Don't Want a Personal Brand

And you don't need one, either

“I am large, I contain multitudes.”
— Walt Whitman

These days, everyone is expected to have a “personal brand.” It’s supposed to be all about controlling how we’re perceived — in other words, marketing ourselves. The thought of it makes me cringe. Why do I have that reaction? And what’s behind the personal branding trend?

While personal branding has more recently become associated with our image on social media — especially for “influencers,” another term I do not like! — the idea has been around for longer than you might think.

The origins of personal branding highlight its problems

My own awareness of personal branding has, thankfully, been limited to recent years. But its origins apparently date back to Napoleon Hill’s 1937 Think and Grow Rich, a precursor to the 2006 The Secret. In fact, The Secret rehashed an idea that Hill had introduced, the Law of Attraction — which promises that if you focus hard enough on the stuff you want, it will come to you. Think and Grow Rich was based on a lie about a conversation with Andrew Carnegie, par for the course for a charlatan author prone to engaging in fraud and other shady business dealings that tended to end in bankruptcy. Not an auspicious beginning for the personal brand.

Most people now credit the personal brand idea, or at least its popularization, to a 1997 Fast Company article by Tom Peters, “The Brand Called You.” The title tells you all you need to know. But if you want to read on, you’ll find lines like “We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc.” and “You’re every bit as much a brand as Nike, Coke, Pepsi, or the Body Shop.”

Tom Peters, naturally, refers to himself as a brand in the bio at the end of the article, in which he claims he’s “the world’s leading brand when it comes to writing, speaking, or thinking about the new economy.” Does saying this make it so? And can a person be a brand? Being a brand seems even worse than having a brand.

Since the 1990s, the personal brand idea has been adopted enthusiastically. Online courses like “A Brand Called You” attract tens of thousands of hopeful personal brand builders.

Personal brand proponents tell us we must sell ourselves. They tell us that building a personal brand is essential if we’re to outcompete others when building a business or seeking promotions. They tell us that we’ll miss out on success if we don’t create a personal brand.

It’s all about the individual. It’s all about commodifying humans. It’s all about competition and capitalism.

None of those are appealing to a Flower Child like myself. Does that tell you something about my brand? Or does it tell you something about who I am, which goes much deeper than a brand?

Since the advent of social media and Instagram influencers, personal branding has gotten even more out of hand than it was in the ‘90s. It’s come to mean a carefully curated image that leaves out a lot, embellishes what it does show, and presents a picture of an idealized life as if it were real.

Personal branding carries a significant risk of sacrificing authenticity. And it reduces people to much less than what we are.

A person is not a brand

Let’s face it: I am not a brand. You are not a brand. We are all complex humans who can’t be reduced to a symbol or a short phrase.

For a business, a brand needs to be compact. It needs to tell you, ideally in few words, what you can expect from that company and its products. If the brand is effective, it should give you a feeling about the business. Brands that have mastered this over time don’t need to tell you what they’re offering; we all know what to expect just from seeing the Apple, Nike, or Coke logos.

A brand also needs to be consistent. If you buy a Coke one day, you want to know what to expect of the Coke you buy in a few days — or a few years. If it changes materially, you might switch to another brand. If you buy a new Mac, you want to know that you’ll get the same quality and experience that you got from your last one.

Whatever you think of Coke, Nike, or Apple, you know what they’re about. They’ve spent time and effort getting you to know that, and there’s no good reason for them to change what they’ve built up.

You, on the other hand, are a multifaceted, ever-changing human. At least, I hope you are. It doesn’t make sense to pin a brand on that.

Beyond personal branding

In the absence of a personal brand, what does make sense?

I get that we need to promote ourselves to get recognition at work, to find work, to advance in our work. I encourage young colleagues to do that. And I promote others at work; I believe in giving credit where it’s due and enjoy lifting up my co-workers. But doing this isn’t the same as branding, and it doesn’t require branding.

Outside of the work world (although relevant to it, because we’re still humans when we’re working), I enjoy learning about personality characteristics and types. I don’t want to reduce myself or anyone else to a personality type, but I’ve found I can learn a lot about myself and others from systems like Myers-Briggs, Gretchen Rubin’s Four Tendencies, and even the Enneagram. And of course, I’ve characterized the hidden generation I belong to, the Flower Children.

That doesn’t mean that any of those paint a complete — or static — picture of who I am.

I also get that we all choose how we present ourselves to the world in myriad ways: from the clothes we wear, what music we listen to, and what we eat to our political beliefs, our religious affiliations or lack of them, our pastimes … the list goes on and on. To some extent, we all reveal what we want to reveal and conceal what we want to conceal. We all want to be perceived in a certain way, though that may — and often does — change over time.

But we can try to focus less on how we’re perceived and more on what kind of person we want to be. One of the gifts of growing older is a tendency to move in that direction. We’re social creatures; I don’t believe anyone who says they don’t care what people think of them. But we can loosen the grip of caring about that and choose to focus instead on growing and improving so we can be who we want to be. We can focus on what’s important to us and put our energy into developing in those areas.

Those of us still in the workforce do need to present ourselves in a way that’s conducive to staying there. We need to maintain a certain image. But that image should be authentic. And rather than focusing on building our personal brand, we can focus on honing our skills and being of service — so we have something valuable to contribute, and therefore something valuable to promote.

So, go ahead and build up your LinkedIn profile and engage with others there. Attend networking events. Update your LinkedIn profile as your skills and interests grow and change.

But don’t limit yourself to a brand. You’re much more than that.

If I have a personal brand, it’s not having a personal brand. I’m good with that.