After reading a couple of recentish pieces on Tom Peters’ site about “Brand You” (here and here) and the original column by Lucy Kellaway , which he linked to, I decide to write a follow up to my piece, “Unbranded You”.
Instead I found I had plunged into a long meditation on identity, the market, authenticity and our changing world, which took me to some interesting places, but a long way from writing anything.
So, instead, I am going to focus on a couple of extracts from two entries from the blog of that master cartographer of the human landscape, Grant McCracken. They, I suspect, might point forward to a more useful strategy for the future than the Brand You formula, which, while in one set of terms, worked quite successfully in the Eighties and Nineties, but, as much of Tom Peters’ other work suggests,may be less appropriate in the emerging world that faces us now.
The first extract is from a piece entitled “Cate Blanchett: Brand Exemplar”:
“Contradiction is one of the sources from which fluidity and openness come. Blanchett is “candid and private, gregarious and solitary, self-doubting and daring, witty and melancholy.” The idea that a brand could be any of these things is a little dizzying. The idea that it could all of these things at once, is completely removed from the realm of possibility. Still, that’s doesn’t mean that brands won’t someday master contradiction. After all, if a real world of perfect dynamism is truly upon us, it won’t have any choice.”
The second is simply called, “Noise”:
“I found myself thinking that some of the most interesting people these days are hybrids. In fact, it’s relatively easy to be one thing. In fact, we got pretty good at being one thing. These days, the trick is to be several things. This is more difficult, but I think Rosenwald is right to say that it gives us access to new creative powers. Selves used to be declaried unfit for habitation when filled with diversity, accident, and noise. But these are now the signatures of someone well defined. Hybrid selves are good to live. Good and noisy.”
Read both the posts in full to get what I am groping for, but my sense is that rather than developing a public persona that can be expressed in two or three words, like a conventional brand, a good and noisy identity, “filled with diversity, accident, and noise”, is the way to the future.