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The backlash against “personal branding” has begun. I saw it first in this post by Yvonne in BlogHer. Now you can feel the line begin to whip with Manifesto: I am Not a Brand, by Maureen Johnson, also in BlogHer. Bravo.
The pull quote: “We can, if we group together, fight off the weenuses and hosebags who want to turn the Internet into a giant commercial.”
Tags: BlogHer, brand, branding, hosebags, Manifesto, Maureen Johnson, personal branding, weenuses, Yvonne
Branding has jumped the shark. The meme is stale. Worn out. Post-peak. If branding were a show on Fox, it would be cancelled next week.
I can witness this trend by watching links going to three posts I made last month:
The latest to point this direction is People Aren’t Brands, by one of these guys here (I see no byline) in UKSN, the UK Sports Network. After pointing generously to the second of the posts above, they say,
In the current business world, brands aren’t human beings. They should be, and any social media practitioner worth her salt will be working damn hard with their clients to try and make them more so, but as it stands they are companies, corporate vehicles which are not set up to deal with human error…the kind we are all susceptible to, especially some high profile celebs.
Well, all due respect (and UKSN deserve plenty), brands aren’t people. True, it’s good to humanize companies, turn them inside out, tear down the walls of Fort Business, and otherwise cut out the pro forma BS that tends more commonly to bottle up a company’s humanity than to celebrate and leverage it. But doing that isn’t branding. It’s just good sense.
True, branding is a helpful way to align a company’s distinctions with its identity, or to make it more attractive, memorable and stuff like that. But it matters far less than a well-earned reputation. Consider these statements:
Now let’s re-phrase those using the word “brand” instead of “reputation.”
Two points there. First, it’s hard to re-phrase reputation as brand, no matter how you put it. Second, branding is not positioning. By that I mean it would be easier to make positioning statements about any of those companies than to make a branding statement.
That’s because brands are nothing but statements. At best they are a well-known and trusted badge, name or both. At worst they’re a paint job, a claim, a rationalization or an aspiration. Branding can help a reputation, but it can’t make one. Real work does that. Accomplishment over time does that.
Consider for a moment the value of Toyota’s reputation as a maker of reliable cars. This reputation was earned over at least five decades. Millions of people have had good experiences with reliable Toyota cars and trucks. That reputation has kept Toyota’s head above water through the trials of the last year, when an endless string of bad news stories about sudden acceleration and other faults have been streaming through the news media. In the tug between bad news and good reputation, branding was a no-show.
Judged by the standards of real branding companies (such as Procter & Gamble, which invented and named the practice), Toyota’s branding work has been mediocre at best. It has created cars with confusing names (Corolla, Corona, Carina, Celica, Crown, Cresta, Cressida) and weird hard-to-pronounce names (Camry, Yaris), and has produced relatively little memorable advertising, considering the size of the company and the quality of its cars. Worse, those Toyotathon ads by local dealers, which ran until the Daily Show’s Toyotathon of Death segment buried them for good, were among the most persistent and annoying pitches of all time. In fact, Toyota dealers in general had relatively bad reputations. The one thing Toyota did well was make reliable cars. Toyota’s reputation persists because it was earned, not just claimed.
Branding is jumping the shark now because, on the whole, the Net favors reality over bullshit. Saying stuff may get more attention than doing stuff, at least in the short run. But doing stuff is what makes the world work.
The hard thing for social media folks is that they’re still working the Saying Stuff beat while Doing Stuff is what matters most. Getting companies to do different stuff, or to do the same stuff differently, is hard. Getting companies to do either of those things for long enough to earn a reputation for it is harder still.
But, good luck with that.
Meanwhile here’s how UKSN (in its People Aren’t Brands post) advises companies aligning with sports figures:
Corporates need to let go of the term ‘brand’ and all the connotations it brings when they are working with celebrities. When they hire the celeb, they think that person is now representative of the brand…something which humans can’t do! They can be themselves and if the company is comfortable with whom they are and what they stand for as a human being…then there is value to be derived by association. Expecting the person to fit into the perceived brand of a company is a recipe for (potential) disaster.
All good advice. What makes branding especially difficult in the sports world is that celebrity itself, and the fashions surrounding it, are part of the game. Sports figures endorse, and are endorsed by, “corporates,” and both benefit from each other. This morning I heard that money offered by teams shouldn’t have that much influence on which team LeBron James signs up with next (so long as they’re all within a few million dollars of each other), because he’ll make far more from his corporate affiliations. This is a set of considerations where UKSN knows far more than I do, and where branding of the old P&G sort still matters a great deal.
Sports is a special case. So are fashion and celebrity, and how all three of those overlap.
In most of society, however — including most of the business world — who you are and what you do matter more than how you look and how famous you become. Because who you are and what you do are what make the world a better place. And not just something to talk about.
[Late addition…] Tom Ford with Tina Brown on marketing and branding. Great clip.
Tags: brand, branding, brands, celebrity, corporates, fashion, LeBron James, marketing, Nike, Peets, Procter & Gamble, reputation, Tina Brown, Tom Ford, Toytota, USKN
Lots of trackbacks (or pingbacks) are spam, and I don’t approve them for the comments section. But some pass the first sniff test, and some are interesting enough to warrant a reply. That’s what happened with the post “To be (a brand) or not to be (a brand)”, at a blog called Daily Breaking News Update. I’m not linking to either, because I think I fell here for a splog (a neologism I like, coined by Mark Cuban, for a spam blog).
What got me interested in the piece, naturally, was this paragraph…
It may be that some of the fallout from the Tiger Woods scandal has made the idea of personal branding seem trickier – people are people, after all, not objects and not cattle. As Doc Searls has argued in two recent blog posts, brands are “boring” at best and “bull” at worst.
The post ended, provocatively enough, this way:
Undoubtedly, building trust is fundamental to business success. Maintaining reputation is crucial, whether or not you want your name to be synonymous with a product, a service or a company.
What are your thoughts on personal branding? Has it become impossible? Or has it become ubiquitous?
So I took the bait and posted an answer in the comments section. Here it is:
I think the Tiger Woods experience demonstrates the risks of hiring a celebrity to personify a company’s brand. Besides Nike with Michael Jordan, I can’t think of a single case where this kind of personification has worked in the long run. Maybe some other readers can; but I’m not sure it makes much difference. Nike will stand or fall on the quality of its products, not on the qualities of its celebrity representatives.
As for personal branding, I still think it’s an oxymoron. Branding is a corporate practice, not a personal one. Build a reputation by doing good work. Put that work where others can judge its value. Contribute to the success of others, and credit others generously for their contributions to your success. Never promote for its own sake. I think it’s a mistake to categorize these practices as forms of “branding,” because they are expressions of humanity and integrity.
Branding works for companies and products in part because those things are not people. Buildings and offices and ballparks and shoes may have human qualities, but are not themselves human. Likewise humans may be industrious or durable or attractive in the manner of good companies, but that doesn’t make them corporate.
You and I are not brands. Our parents did not raise us to be brands. Nor would we want our children to be brands, any more than we want them to be logos.
“Personal branding” is a nice gloss on playing for celebrity. And celebrity is a Faustian bargain. Ask any veteran celebrity and they’ll tell you that. They live in fishbowls and yet, for all their familiarity, are not well understood as three-dimensional human beings. The healthy ones deal with it gracefully. The unhealthy ones use their celebrity as a façade (as with Tiger Woods), as a pass to a virtual Las Vegas where everybody keeps indiscretions secret (as with Tiger Woods), or as an ideal they can never really match (and hence seek surgical alignment, as with too many to count).
Many of us assume without question that celebrity also equates with income. It doesn’t. There is a degree of correlation, but in the long run we get hired for the useful goods we bring to the market’s table. Not because we have a “personal brand.”
Building trust and maintaining a reputation matter. Calling both “branding” is a categorical error.
Then I took a closer look at the blog and realized that it had no apparent author, and the about page was WordPress boilerplate. So I looked up the headline on Google, and got a fog of identical results.
The original appears to be this one, at ReadWrite Start. The byline is Audrey Watters, and that’s the post that most (or perhaps all — I didn’t go down the whole list) of the many citing tweets point to.
But there are all these other re-posts as well (listed in order of Google’s first page of search results):
All were from ReadWriteWeb feeds, obviously. I suppose these might be good for ReadWriteWeb (which deserves the respect it gets), but they also have the effect of deliberately false radar images. They are also part of the Google AdSense ecosystem, within which publications of all sizes try to game the system by re-posting attractive postings that will bait traffic and inbound linkage, goosing up the site’s PageRank to the point where ad placements appear, click-throughs happen, and money comes in.
An interesting thing about all these re-postings is that Audrey Watters‘ byline does not appear in them. So we have the interesting irony of a post about personal branding re-appearing all over the place with the writer’s name stripped out.
Obviously some dysfunctional things are happening here. And I doubt any more talk about “branding” will help, beyond accounting for some of the motives involved.
Tags: Audrey Watters, branding, brands, Gapingvoid, ReadWriteWeb
Here’s a job for the Citizen Media’s long tail: find the fist time anybody used the terms “Craigslist killer”, “Craigslist case” or “Craigslist murder”. What the effort will highlight are two issues for journalism. One is the absence of an engine that allows easy first-date or date-range search. (Unless I’m mistaken about that, which I’d be glad to be. [Later… I am.]) The other is the unfairness of turning the name of a business into an adjective that modifies the noun for a crime — essentially re-branding that business as a criminal accessory.
Why “Craigslist killer”? Well, the easy answer is that the killer apparently targeted victims he found on Craigslist, and that’s interesting. Meaning it’s kind of new and different. Murder goes digital. Hey, you don’t hear about “the phone book killer” or “the newspaper killer,” do you? (Well, actually, Craigslist has been called that too.)
My point here isn’t about how natural and easy it is to name a case “Craigslist murder”, but about what that does to Craigslist. I think it’s unfair, as well as a bummer for Craig Newmark and the rest of the Craigslist folks, even if the label is hard to avoid using.
Meanwhile, I’d love to see better chronological search on Google Blogsearch and Technorati, both of which offer it, at least for syndicated sources.
Dr. Weinberger covers this, and adjacent topics.
Tags: brand, branding, Craig Newmark, craigslist, crime, Google Blogsearch, murder, Phillip Markoff, Technorati
