Is Your Personal Brand Your Self?

As I watch my Twitter Stream, I see the idea of a personal brand popping up everywhere. Many blogs promise to help me develop my personal brand, tell me of the importance of my personal brand, or like good romance columnists tell me ten mistakes to avoid in creating my personal brand. When I look at people’s twitter profiles and see how many success trainers, motivational speakers, direct marketers, and other who are trying leverage their personality and knowledge into a living, I fully see the motivation for these entries. But part of me wonders if it is wise to participate in the commodification of one’s self.

By “self,”  I mean that internal being whom we think of as who we really, truly are.  Various philosophers would argue that this “internal being” is a mental construct made up of our beliefs, our desires, and our choices. Phenomenology would argue that we can know who we are only through the world’s response to us.  The only way to see the self is through the mirror of other people’s reactions to us.

If one thinks this way about branding, one notes that the words used to describe an effective brand can also desribe the self–integrity, authenticity, accessibility, etc.  Obviously the person creating the brand thinks of it as a persona, a mask, which carries his image out into the world and which remains unchanging in the marketplace.  We all know that the brand isn’t the person.  But happens to the person who has branded herself?  Is she trapped in by this mask?  In striving to survive in the market, the face may become much more like the mask.  Consider the of the meaning of branding cattle.  Are our psyches as mutilated as the cattle by this act?

Through  personal branding the distance between commercial life and private life shrinks. We will become like the character Crow in Sam Shepard’s play, The Tooth of Crime, who sings:

`I believe in my mask–the man I made up is me

I believe in my dance and my destiny

The validation of  our selves becomes the recognition and spreading of the brand–our mask and our dance.

Tagged as: Brand, Marketing, Philosophy, Sam Shepard, Tooth of Crime, Twitter