Today’s word is one I think about a lot. It’s a ubiquitous word, so common in business parlance that it’s become common in everyday parlance as well. Who doesn’t know the link between brand and marketing? For someone going into a business, any business, branding is vitally important. Branding is how a business can quickly package any given item for patrons to quickly identify as serving their needs.
This goes for writers, too. Branding books according to genre is how readers tell they want to buy my book. It’s an art I’m still in the process of learning as relating to my industry.
The reason I think about it a lot is because of the way modern society espouses its use on people.
Who, new from education, hasn’t been told how to brand themselves for today’s job market? Who hasn’t heard of its partner, the ‘elevator pitch’, in which we declare ourselves worth someone’s time in short and pithy sentences?
I’m not going to argue that branding, in itself, isn’t a necessary and vital function of running a business. The part I object to is that we’ve moved from using it as easy-access packaging to branding people as commodities.
Etymology Online identifies the use of ‘brand’ as an identifier for general goods to the 1800s. It lists the word as ‘mark made by hot iron’ from the 1500s. And it lists the verb involving burning marks and stigmatisation as being from circa 1400s.
Language can change and evolve a lot even in a short amount of time. The thing is that ‘brand’ hasn’t evolved all that much. Throughout its history its meanings have revolved around immutable possession of an object.
‘Personal branding’ doesn’t step away from that. At all. If anything, it’s the opposite. A brand is associated with an indelible mark — something with which a given object will be forever be associated. ‘Branding’ one’s self turns someone from a person into a thing — a commodity to be sold. It removes personhood. It denies autonomy.
A fast way to determine whether a commodity is right for any given individual is a necessary and valuable thing. But where people are concerned, we already have a word for that: it’s called reputation. Reputation is built upon our choices, our reactions, and the ways in which we resolve difficulties. Someone’s reputation reveals their values, and whether they align with ours. And when they make choices in a way contrary to their reputation, we feel betrayed. Just like branding.
The difference is that because reputation depends on our choices and our actions, it empowers instead of lessens. Reputation is defined by personal choice and will: it can’t belong to a commodity. It’s a characteristic of personhood.
So when I see blogs espousing the value of ‘personal branding’, when I’m told (in workplace training, in well-meaning advice, in business books) that I need to think about my brand and what it means — I cringe.
And then I walk, very fast, in the other direction. And I make choices which take me away from it. I know, as an indie writer, that I could just publish works under my own name and be done with it; let Amazon and B&N and whoever else deal with the complicated metadata. The choice to create Aurichalcum Publishing was a choice to separate the person from the commodity. Now, when I licence books, there’s distance between me and it. And I can work on both my reputation, as a writer, and Auri’s branding, as a business, as I go. As separate items.
I understand why the alternative seems frightening. Reputation takes time — a lot of time. There’s no fast and easy response to creating it; only the consistent fulfilment of values. Branding, and its elevator pitch partner, are quick and easy … and dehumanising.
I question the wisdom of putting speed over humanity. Even in so simple a way as the application of a common and innocuous word to a person.
Aurichalcum Publishing 