Who wants to be a brand?
some thoughts of personal branding and the fracturing of self
For many years, I studied and worked in marketing and branding. My master’s thesis back in 2007 was on online branding of UK museums, before iPhones or social media -or online branding, really - were a properly a thing… you could say I was ahead of the curve then, lol.
Before I started my photography business I worked in marketing for an IT company and gained experience of corporate branding - and rebranding. I gave personal branding talks at networking groups and taught personal branding to photographers. I got hired for personal branding photoshoots - and hired others to do the same for me.
I know what a good personal brand is, and why you’d want to have one if you want to sell more stuff (goods or services or get headhunted - what a weird term, huh?) - or even succeed at online dating (yes, personal branding photoshoots for dating sites is an actual thing).
I know people buy from people - but not just some random people, only people they know, like love and trust. And you build that love and trust - and a sales funnel - through a carefully curated niche, and a dutifully maintained brand. Stay on topic. Do not deviate. Don’t say anything remotely controversial. Do not have a human reaction. Be a good girl. Build that trust and predictability. Sell more stuff.
So when I say I know all the reasons to cultivate a personal brand... I really do.
But the thing is, I’m getting increasingly uneasy about the very concept of “personal branding” - and I don’t think I want to be one anymore.
I don’t think people are meant to be brands. We are not meant to make ourselves into commodities to win at capitalism.
* * *
That feeling of not really wanting to be a brand has been floating around in my head for a while now. One of the best things brands can do is repeat themselves ad infinitum and - my neurodivergent brain being what it is - I simply thought I was just bored of it all. But then I came to understand that my uneasiness around “personal branding” was more fundamental than that - I just couldn’t articulate it yet.
A brand, at its core, is a promise. A promise of stability, of consistency, of dependability. And so, by definition, brands are supposed to be more or less static, or at the very least not stray too far off their core promise. Rebranding or going outside your core proposition is always a risky affair - it can go great, or can backfire massively (I recently learned that Colgate once tried to expand into frozen foods… and the fact that you instantly and instinctively know it wasn’t a good idea tells you a lot).
And that’s all well and good - for a company. For a person, perhaps not so much.
Take photographers, for example. Most of us operate under our own names, our own personal brands, and are forever battling with how far we can push our promise and proposition. Can I be a family photographer and a pet photographer? Family photographer and a boudoir photographer? Automotive photographer and a wedding photographer? Can I pose people AND let them run free and wild? Can I be a photographer and do something else entirely, all under one brand? Will it confuse people? Will it confuse Google / search engine gods and lead me to lose work?
Where does that line lie before I have to separate my areas of interest, my “digital selves” into nice neat little containers, ready for easy consumption - and to make it easier for the algorithms? Where does that line lie before I have to separate my “work self” from my “real self” - both perpetually entangled and potentially visible on the world wide web? Do I have to forgo my true authentic expression in the digital town square - the only communal space many of us seem to have left - for the fear that it might “taint” my “work self” (a question I wrestle with in my post Why can’t we talk about it?), and the danger that every word I say may be taken out of context and every comma scrutinised?
In one of the first chapters Doppelgänger (the book about all different kinds of doubling we are experiencing, and the dangers of it all), Naomi Klein dives into personal branding, drawing on her experience with writing and promoting her first book No Logo and how her thinking has evolved since. She talks about 20-somethings she teaches who can trace their earliest memory of the concept of being a brand to middle school (when they are told to do something that would “look good” on their future CVs) or to parents warning them to curate themselves online (for the sake of future, imaginary, employers), and teachers telling them to package up their identities, hobbies and traumas in marketable ways in college admission essays.
How sad is that?
In that chapter, where she talks about people’s attempts to make her into a personal brand she didn’t want to become, one line in particular struck a chord with me:
“Good brands are immune to fundamental transformation. Conceding to having become one at age thirty would have meant foreclosing on what I saw as my prerogative to change, evolve and hopefully improve. It would have locked me into performing this particular version of me, indefinitely.”
Foreclosing on my prerogative to evolve and improve.
Performing this particular version of me, indefinitely.
And therein lies the problem - for me. At age of (almost) forty-five, I don’t want to have to stop evolving.
We are complex human beings, not fixed, singular, unchanging identities like brands. We, humans, contain multitudes and contradictions - but being a personal brand demands fixedness and stasis. It demands not evolving - or in any case not evolving quickly enough to meet the moment we are all in, collectively and inevitably, whether we like it or not, whether we want to admit it or not.
To be a good well-behaved “brand of me” I would have to stay in my narrow lane of the one thing I’m most known for, and not to have too many opinions outside of it. Or, I could “rebrand” and be something else entirely. Or, I could blow it all up - intentionally or unintentionally - and face the consequences.
As Naomi Klein succinctly puts it, you can either “follow the dictates” of your own curiosity as an artist / writer / creator, or be a well-managed brand.
What my curiosity and my intuition tells me to do is follow all of the leads, despite it being against everything a “good personal brand” is supposed to do.
It tells me to write stuff down and hit publish. It tells me to experiment with collage and with embroidery and with mark-making. It tells me to read and talk about hard stuff like, you know, genocides and white supremacy and gulags and colonialism in its many forms. It tells me to be inspired by haka and Göbekli Tepe, and to go photograph a cemetery and a blackberry bush, and learn about the witch trials and about the commons, and take a poetry class despite never having liked poetry and to spend hours scrolling through archival documents to find out that, indeed, there were twins in my family, and, and, and, and…
It tells me to ingest all this information and make all these connections between seemingly unrelated things for no apparent reason, except that everything your curiosity tells you to do, follow and try ultimately informs your art. It tells me to integrate it all into the way I run my creative business.
I know to follow this curiosity because I’m only where I am today, and the person I am today, because I trusted it and followed it before. I quit my job as a lawyer because of it. I moved countries because of it. I got into photography because of it. I unschool my child (who is, arguably, is a lot more creative than I am) because of it. I dive into the sea with my camera because of it. I published a book because of it.
In Big Magic Elizabeth Gilbert (who has now become a brand, I think, whether she wanted to or not… and that’s an inherent contradiction of it all) writes about how our curiosity teaches us to become ourselves: “You may spend your whole life following your curiosity and have absolutely nothing to show for it at the end except one thing. You will have the satisfaction of knowing that you passed your entire existence in devotion to the noble human virtue of inquisitiveness.”
(On a slightly separate note, another concept from Big Magic that stuck with me is that ideas have energy and consciousness and they are always on the look out for human partners to help them manifest themselves… and if their human partners bat them away because it’s not “on brand”, we don’t have the time, or whatever - the idea will go find someone else to bring it forth. The story Gilbert tells to illustrate it about the book she didn’t write - but someone else did - was very moving).
And so it seems to me that as a creative, being a “good brand” is in direct opposition to being a good artist.
So I think I’m choosing to mismanage whatever “personal brand” I still have and be an unruly artist following her own nose with fingers in lots of different pies instead, forever learning, forever evolving, forever trying to be better and do better. I’m choosing to remain a whole human being and to avoid the fracturing of myself for the benefit of my imaginary audience - and to the detriment of my own mental health.
I choose to make mistakes and learn from them - instead of always being perfect. But thats for another post.
Hey! If you’re new here, I’m Antonina Mamzenko - a photographer, an artist, a writer, a mentor and a whole load of other things. This Substack is my place to let my thoughts run wild. Sometimes I’ll talk about politics. Sometimes I’ll talk about photography and art projects I’m working on. Sometimes I talk to interesting people on my podcast. Stick around, leave a comment, maybe you’ll like it here.
This post is free to read. If you’d like to support my writing, you can become a free or paid subscriber to this newsletter.
Other ways you can support my work:
Buy my photography book, Beauty Hunting.
Buy signed limited edition photography prints.
Antonina this is so relatable, and your skill with words really untangles something I haven’t been able to pin down clearly for myself. I think your post is a lovely manifesto for being whole, in all its complexity.