My Personal Brand Story: A Website Prologue

There were many subjects, assignments and classes in the program, but only one theme, us PR professionals were at this school to start building a “personal brand.” 

We were told prospective employers are looking for people who have a clear sense of what they want from a career, but more importantly, they wanted people who could tell a compelling story about themselves. After all, PR and marketing is mostly just telling stories. So show people you’re good at it by telling the best possible story you can about YOU!

It’s fair advice. Humber provided skills and real life experience in classes. The key ingredients were: identical foundational (generic) assignments for everyone in the program, free work for companies designed as assignments (I remember doing pro-bono work for some non-profits, and cold surveys in the Eaton centre for some reason). Then all I had to do was have a vague idea of the type of PR I wanted to do. But as long as I could stitch it together into a personal brand “story”, pretty soon, I’d be hireable enough for an unpaid internship. 

Reflecting now, it seems what I understood of a “personal brand” was:

PERSONAL BRAND = generic skills/experience + career desire + any story you can tell about yourself. 

Slowly and surely, I was a good student and worked on my brand. I was “an arts loving communications professional who loved being creative and collaborative.” At the time, I remember feeling like that wasn’t quite right. I could never get the brand math problem to come together in a perfect way. I thought it was my fault. But I realize now it wasn’t.

The problem is the idea of personal branding.

Creating “my brand” was telling only stories prospective employers wanted to hear about me. Not necessarily the stories that were most true. I never even wrote stories for myself at that point. I was a 23-year-old university grad. I still had no way of knowing what I was, or what I wanted, let alone, what “my brand” was. 

I remember thinking there were “parts of me” that were not part of “my brand.” So I intentionally left out things like:
- “I think capitalism and most corporations are greedy and soul-sucking”
- “I have a hard time working a 9-5 schedule and think it’s an inefficient way to structure my life.”
- “I would rather be creative writing in a cabin somehere than have a desk job”
- “I have no clue what I actually want from life, and think my desires are going to change all the time”
- “I think life is fickle and committing to anything is challenging for me.”

Though those were true things to me, they were somehow “off-brand” of the “professional persona” I was trying to create. So I stuck together a half-baked resume that communicated only the professionally-appealing parts of me and got my first job.

So “my brand” worked in getting me a job, but I still had a lot of secrets to keep. 

The term “personal branding” is still very widely used - and a concept that’s printed about in many big-time business magazines. I realize now I hated it always. So very much. 

There’s a couple reasons. Not only is the term itself just plain creepy. It also equates the value of human identity with a Capitalist construct of “a brand identity.” It takes a special kind of psychopath to want to be a brand over a human being. 

There’s something off about transforming into an “authentic persona” that consists entirely of website design, a professional portfolio, a well-wriiten Linkedin bio, and highly-edited paragraphs and photos on Instagram. If your content were to fade into nothingness, and there was no branding to be seen, would you actually have any semblance of humanity left? 

I hope most people would answer, “of course.”

If there’s still plenty left after your content and “personal branding” is gone. What is a personal brand either than a 100% artificially-crafted persona that mostly has “employability” as it’s goal?

It’s fake. And phony. And should be unnecessary. But I paid for a degree to make one. Are degrees phony too? 

So my questions are: why the hell is personal branding still considered legitimate advice? Why can’t it be enough to just have a good sense of who we are and a good reputation that speaks for itself?

WHAT’S IN A BRAND?

In Capitalism, branding is the answer the questions:
- “what does your company do?”,
- “how does your company do that thing uniquely”
- “what values does your company hold”, and
- “what’s your company’s unique value proposition?

Ironically, company branding usually asks the question, “if your company was a person, who would that person be?”

Personal branding asks the reverse, “if your person were a company, what kind of company would you be?”

I probably don’t have to say this: but businesses and people are very different. Businesses have one goal in mind: money. And a brand is synthetically built to turn a business’ desire of money-making into something that is emotionally appealing to human beings. 

But people? The kinds I like to hang with don’t have money-making at the top of their priority list. And because they’re people, there’s no need to go through the synthetic process of making an emotionally-appealing corporate identity. People already have emotions, and empathy, and the ability to connect. 

Imagine someone tried to discover “your unique value proposition” in a human conversation. That’s gross.  How freaking weird is that question in the context of two human beings? We’re just worried about what your specific value is and how you differ from the competition?

If you care to get to know me, let’s have a conversation and do things together and figure it out ourselves. Maybe we’ll talk about marketing, maybe we’ll talk about The Simpsons. Either way, I’m just glad you’re a down-to-earth human being. I’ll get to know you through the power of paying attention/being human and you don’t have to have a 30-second personal brand elevator pitch ready (we literally practiced this is PR school).

HOW DO YOU STAND OUT THEN?

I’m not saying personal brands don’t exist and don’t work. They do. But just because it works doesn’t mean it isn’t creepy and gross. 

There’s very clear examples of people who have personally branded very very well. The Kardashians, Oprah, Dr. Oz, Tim Ferris, Simon Sinek, Tony Robbins, Cesar “The Dog Whisperer” Milan  these people all have websites, teams of employees, and thousands of pieces of content promoting their brands, which are them, but now they’re actually businesses. They also have billions of followers and dollars in their bank account. 

They all answered the branding questions of “what do I do”, “who do I help”and “how do I stand out.” And they do and help and stand out in all those ways.

But I can never quite take folks like this too seriously. Do I have a logical reason? Not really. Just something I feel in my gut. It’s like anyone who works that hard on promoting such a specific image of themselves - is 100% certainly hiding something. Why do you so bad want to be known as “The Dog Whisperer” Cesar Milan - what other name are you afraid to be called? 

Ceaser Milan: The Dog Roller-Overer

These people have literally become corporate entities. It’s all very very intentionally crafted to the point of losing touch with reality.  Sure the human being exists, and you know they’re different than the brand they promote. It’s all an big fake illusion. What is even real anymore? What’s even real ever?

Right, the original question. How do you stand out? Stay present. Know what you believe. Be confident. And be a human. I think that ought to cover it. You don’t need a fucking website.

SO WHY’D YOU MAKE A FUCKING WEBSITE, BRO?

Right. I did make a website for myself, with a logo and everything. I’m writing this right now. Does that mean I’m personally branding myself? 

Technically speaking... yes. I think it does. And I’m actually struggling with it a lot (hence this 2000 word post). I recognize it’s a big fake game. And it’s one that’s kind of fun for me actually. But I even writing this still feel kind of fake. I wrote this initially to figure out my thoughts on why I thought it was important to publish a website, but now writing this sentence, I’m imaging someone reading this. What will they think? Is this whole thing a little trite? Do they think I’m being sincere? I hope so. I really am trying to be. 

I think we’re all forced to be brands these days. How you write your social posts, or what photos you post, what you comment on posts. It’s all performative and intentionally-crafted to communicate a very specific message about who you are and what you care about. Whether your notice or not. Whether you like it or not. Whether it’s true or not. In writing and storytelling, there’s a concept of showing v.s. telling. You want to show more than you tell. 

People in the real world (remember the real world?) speak for themselves in how they show up more than how they tell up. Gut feelings are real, especially about people. It’s up to you to decide if the blog, or photo, or comment is a true reflection of this person, or some PR-school-sanctioned heaping of personal branding bullcrap. It’s not always easy to tell. 

I get why I was taught to personally brand. You can’t escape it. Even in writing this I know people could read into it and be like, “oh that Braeden, he’s got this very anti-establishment, open-dialogue, hyper-creative brand.” And yes. They’d be right. You can boil me down to a brand if you’d like. I’d just prefer you didn’t. Consent okay? Don’t be gross. 

So then, I had to go back to my PR-school memories and ask a question about this website: who is this for? 

This time, I’m definitely not writing it with potential or current employers in mind (except for being afraid of what they’ll think of something like this). I’d like to say I put it together with no other people in mind. But that’s not entirely true.

The thing that changed here is I think I’m writing and making for myself at the forefront. In the end of this, I’m proud to say what I’ve put here isn’t influenced by any hidden desires. It’s just stuff I felt was an honest reflection of my thoughts and wanted to put on a website. 

Over the pandemic, I also had some morbid thoughts. And did a meditation where someone guided me through what it’d be like to die on my deathbed next week. It was just the lift I needed. 

It’s my best attempt at writing about things I care about in a way that felt right to me right now. I want to be clear with myself on what I know, what I believe and what I feel. I like to do that by writing my way through it.

One of the things I cared about was having some sort of record of what I thought and believed to be most true available to the people who were close enough to me to care. 

Is that egotistical? Maybe a little. Is egotistical necessarily a bad thing? I’m not sure. Do I think people really care that deeply about what a PR grad and amateurishly earnest writer has to think? No. But I do believe that some people will care.

Here it is if you need it/want it. It’s my best/most honest shot to date.