Brand Finale Brand Finale MORE magazine | November 2007 | Laurel Wellman
A while ago at a party in Vancouver, an acquaintance started telling me about his career plans. “What I have to do,” he said, “is find a way to really leverage my brand.” He wasn’t talking about his workplace. He wasn’t talking about a particular product. He was, unfortunately, referring to himself.
Over the past decade, most of us have bought into the idea that if you want success, you have to sell yourself. And on some occasions - say, when you're job-hunting - you owe it to yourself to do it as well as possible. But when you're off-duty, wouldn't you rather talk about almost anything else? I know I'd rather hear about almost anything else.
Modern etiquette experts don't seem to have addressed the topic yet, but party chit-chat about "personal brands" is self-involved and boring, not to mention a little creepy. There's something odd about grown people worrying about whether they have readily identifiable labels - quite apart from the ones most of us carryon our handbags.
After all, most of us have early experiences with branding, and they aren't exactly positive:
It's the rare child who escapes being tagged as something, whether it's "the geek," "dumb jock" or "that mouthy kid" -labels that can hurt, even limit, us. So why have we become so eager to put labels on ourselves?
"We all want to belong, and we all want to be seen for who we are," says Danielle LaPorte. "Both are healthy, but you can't do one at the cost of the other." LaPorte should know. Her Vancouver-based consulting business, Style Statement, aims to help its clients' discover their inner identities.
Back in the '90s, the idea that a person could have a brand - apart from one she'd acquired at a booth at the Lollapalooza Festival - was heady stuff. Now it's become so commonplace that it's a mark of media savvy to express admiration for people with "strong brands" - celebrities who have the power to hawk hairpieces, fragrances and faux-fur trimmed puffer jackets.
As well-trained consumers, we accesapt that creating a personal brand powerful enough to warrant a licensing deal is the ultimate status symbol. Conversely, if you think you don't have a strong brand - or any kind of brand - it's easy to start believing that you're a total nobody. "You feel less-than," says LaPorte. "You feel inadequate."
The new millennium brought self-help books to address that problem, of course -like Make a Name for Yourself 8 Steps Every Woman Needs to Create a Personal Brand Strategy for Success, The Brand YU Life: Re-thinking Who You Are Through Personal Brand Management and Be Your Own Brand: A Breakthrough Formula for Standing Out From the Crowd.
And then there's Find a Husband After 35 Using What I Learned at Harvard Business School, in which author Rachel Greenwald is brutal in applying the tricks of brand marketing (including direct mail campaigns) to what she deems the crisis situation of being unmarried. One of the first steps, naturally, is to brand yourself as if you mean it. If, for example, the three-word personal brand statement you have created with her book's guidance includes the word "sporty," you'd better be driving a sporty car - even if you have to go into debt to buy one. The all-too-plausible argument: When you're packaging yourself for the competitive marriage market, you've got to stay on message at all times.
Still, before you panic and repackage yourself as, say, a "playful blond horsewoman," remember that a big part of personal branding - indeed, of marketing and advertising in general - is keeping the message as simple and as digestible as possible. Your quirks, contradictions, and all the depth you've developed as a woman of a certain age
aren't just beside the point; in this case, they're confusing to potential suitors. The advice, basically, is to leave them at home, remember to wear your riding boots to the supermarket and keep up that standing three-week appointment with your colourist.
The book demonstrates a problem with looking for direction in life, or for self-knowledge, in a personal brand:
There's a huge difference between being able to sell yourself - being able to get validation from other people, in other words - and knowing who you are. If by midlife you're not both too complicated to sum yourself up in a glib slogan, and too at ease with yourself to want to, you clearly haven't been having as much fun as you should. And if other people are the only mirror in which you can see yourself, you'll waste your energy courting their approval. "It sucks," says LaPorte bluntly. "It's so destructive."
What Style Statement aims to offer is more of an internal validation. True, LaPorte and business partner Carrie McCarthy create two-word summaries of their clients, but they're too personal - perhaps even too poetic to be brands.
I was skeptical when I started the process, expecting a brand by any other name. But after a roughly hour-long interview with McCarthy, in which she asked dozens of questions about every- thing from my favourite painting to where my dream house would be located, she declared my style statement was Elemental Treasure.
I had been fully prepared to scoff. But I found the phrase unexpectedly resonant, though I didn't break down in tears the way some Style Statement clients have done. Thankfully, though the words have a meaning for me, they would be of no practical use in, say, writing a personal ad for an online dating site or duping a potential employer into believing I'm a go-getter. As it turns out, that's the whole point. "It's almost like a vision statement," says LaPorte. "It's a guide, but it's an inner guide. It's not an advertising slogan."
With that, I realized the crux of the problem with personal brands: When you've finally reached a point in your life at which you're ready to explore new directions and old dreams, it's a waste of time to focus, instead, on simplifying your "message" for other people. Advertising slogans are meant to sell products, not human beings; the touchstone you need - whether or not someone else helps you find it - is the one that speaks to you, not everyone else.
Or, as LaPorte puts it, more pithily: "People are not boxes of cereal."