Be the Brand - or Not

In the age of online solopreneurship, we have become brands

Social media souls for sale, or the system of solopreneurship

So many s’s. Appreciate the alliteration.

On to serious business.

Ha, business. Unintended double entendres are the best.

The last decade or so has seen the rise and near-monopoly of a few social media platforms and the relegation of many aspects of life to the internet. Such relatively quick (and dare I say ‘disruptive’?) changes in the way we interact also change the way we live. And make a living. Today, even though it still feels a bit like a specific niche, plenty of people are making a living online. There are even TikTok celebrities these days. Often, they do so as self-employed workers.

Or brands. The most successful online money-makers have become brands. What they say/do, how they say/do it, which platforms they use, which partners they engage with… It all combines into something bigger than the person. The brand.

Brands are usually tied to businesses. True enough, surviving - or even thriving - in the online world requires a certain flair for entrepreneurship. Initially, you are a business by yourself, for yourself. Of course, many of the people with a large following employ an entire team behind the scenes. Behind the scenes because the person is the brand and the brand the person. Self-branding or personal branding is the name of the game. (A term which apparently only appeared in the late 1990s, roughly coinciding with the advent of the internet in its current form.)

Personal branding has become so important that it is a massive business in itself. Thousands of e-books, blogs, and influencers promise you the magical keys to building your own brand, making a passive income or earning six figures a month by doing what you like, and living the life of your dreams. Ah, the sweet serpent’s promise of the digital age.

I better start building a brand.

Brand new new brand

It’s not a choice, really. You’re branded either way. (Double entendre two. Words are fun.)

Which made me think. What is my ‘brand’? (A cold chill still creeps across my spine when I use the word this way. Long live the introverts among us.) What defines my writing and other adventures? I wish I could say something cool like “I’m undefinable” and believe it, but I can’t.

No one is undefinable. Complex, changeable, context-dependent, multi-layered? Sure, all of the above. But undefinable? Nope. Yet it remains hard for me to define or brand myself, even though every Substack success promise I’ve read tells me I should. If I were to focus on one specific topic, that would be helpful. However, if you’ve been following some of my things here or elsewhere, you’ll know that my cursed brain doesn’t work that way. A fox in a world of hedgehogs, to co-opt Isaiah Berlin’s influential essay. Or so it feels sometimes anyway.

(Berlin’s essay was later mashed together with C.P. Snow’s ‘The Two Cultures’ by Stephen Gould in his ‘The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox’, for all the literature geeks out there.)

Rather than trying to brand myself, I’ll rely on your informed thoughts. If you’ve subscribed to Thinking Ahead or follow me another way: why? How would you define my ‘brand’? Comment below. (Another thing that comes up in almost every self-branding self-help snake oil: audience engagement. Wink wink.)

To brand or not to brand?

I’m not saying (writing) that branding is bad. It is and remains one of the ways, perhaps even the number one way, to establish yourself online and start building a platform, an audience, an income, or whatever you’re aiming for. There are a few risks with the self-branding ideal that worry me, though.

• Brand identity trumps content. Everything has to be ‘on brand’. You are reduced, or reduce yourself, to one interest or content type. For many people, this works and if it feels right for you, it’s probably your best bet. ‘Find your niche’ is one of those often-touted edicts of online success, after all. But for the multipotentialites among us, this feels like a trap.

• Brand becomes ideology. People follow the brand, obey the brand, revere the brand. The brand becomes unassailable, unquestionable, unmockable. This is the shortest path to shutting down critical thinking and setting up a digital dictatorship. Sounds a bit over the top, but I’m pretty sure you can think of several people who(se online brands) have become pretty much untouchable lest they unleash a horde of followers on all those who dare question them…

• Others (try to) take over the brand. If you manage to build your brand (*shudders*), you might attract the attention of other people or companies who want to collaborate with you. Ambassador and affiliate programs, guest blogs, webinars, you name it. This is great; a good sign. Until they start trying to dictate what you can or cannot say. (Not saying that they will, but it can be a risk.) Or someone can try to hack important branded accounts to spread misinformation or make monetary gains.

• Losing balance. A brand needs to be stable enough to have an identity, yet flexible enough to change when needed, much like how the greatest artists are the ones that can reinvent themselves without alienating their fanbase. David Bowie, Madonna, Outkast… That perfect balance between stability and flexibility is difficult to achieve and easy to lose.

• The brand takes over. A combination of a few of the above points. When your brand becomes your personal ideology and takes over your identity, you’re in trouble. Life is more than your online persona, more than your business, more than the solopreneurial self you’ve created. When you can’t put away your phone for a conversation with your partner, what have you really gained?

Let the branding begin.

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