How to Personally Brand Yourself without Personally Branding Yourself

In 1997, Tom Peters popularized the idea that job seekers should take charge of promoting themselves through personal branding.

“We are CEOs of our own companies,” Peters wrote. “To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You.”

The idea was liberating. It meant that workers were no longer defined by the companies that hired them, or the roles on their job descriptions.

Instead, personal branding got people thinking about ways they added value through unique contributions. It helped people redefine their identities by the achievements they were most proud of, and it taught people to pitch these identities in ways to wield opportunity, influence, and power. 

And the idea has taken off. Dramatically. It’s being taught in business classes across the globe as best practice to leverage a career. But the way this idea is being talked about has left some people uncomfortable and has led to some very public criticism in the last few years.  

The Personal Branding Myth

At a 2017 forum at The Warton School at the University of Pennsylvania, Sheryl Sandberg was asked about how business people should manage their personal brand. 

“You don’t have a personal brand,” she answered. “Crest has a brand. Perrier has a brand. People are not that simple. When we are packaged, we’re ineffective and inauthentic.”

She’s not alone in her distain. Editorialist David Brooks writes, “A lot of young people I know talk about ‘working their brand’ and sometimes I wish that word had never been invented.”

Brooks explains this a step further. The risk with a personal brand, he writes, is that while it has a reputation, it doesn’t have a soul. “A person has private dignity. A brand is a creation for an audience.” 

What Brooks and Sandberg are getting at is what Jeremiah Gardner calls “The Personal Branding Myth.” It’s the idea that to be successful and accepted by a professional community, you have to be polished and processed.

“The personal branding myth,” Gardner writes, “tells you to become more machine than human, more processed than raw and more fluff than substance.”

In essence, personal branding is reduced to strategies for showing a target audience how you fit the mold of the perfect professional.

This may be why Sandberg and Gardner speak about retching in their preludes to this topic. It denies the most fundamental aspects of being human: the messy striving against limitations, flaws, and weaknesses. 

But to be fair, was this Tom Peters’ intent?

Can we reconcile his original liberating idea about personal branding with the realities of human frailty?

Absolutely.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Personal Branding

As Brooks, Sandberg, and Gardner suggest, the problem with personal branding is that it often deemphasizes the complex experience of being a “person” and encourages promotion of a static, often artificial, “brand.” 

To guard against this, we must look at ways to celebrate and centralize our humanity as we relate to others as professionals.

The way to do this, Gardner argues, is to focus on the relational aspect of branding. “A brand,” he explains, “is how we emotionally and intuitively relate to a specific product, organization, or idea.”

Personal branding, then, is simply creating a relationship by framing our stories in a way that relates to others both professionally and emotionally.

It cannot be done well by following a formula or reading a self-help book. But perhaps it can be practiced through a commitment to discovering who we are as we respond to challenges, learn from mistakes, and resolve to remain sincere as we tell others about ourselves.