The personal brand loop
When success means branding our personal lives and living our personal brands
If you’ve been job hunting in the past decade or so, if you’re a Gen Z or a millennial worker, a student who’s visited your school career center, if you’ve tried to find success as an artist, a writer, a performer, an entrepreneur, you’ve almost certainly heard the advice that you must have a personal brand.
Personal branding is the process of curating and maintaining your public image, often online, with the goal of attracting professional connections and opportunities. To get more technical, you build your personal brand by expressing the value you add and what you stand for, creating engaging content for your target audience on social media and personal websites, and curating a visual presence through everything from your physical appearance to the fonts and colors you use online. By executing these tasks consistently, experts argue, you show prospective employers or clients that you’re credible and authentic.
If you think none of this applies to you, think again: according to Northeastern University, personal brands are “expected” in the digital age, with 85% of hiring managers saying that personal branding plays a role in hiring decisions. As Rebecca Jennings writes, “The internet has made it so that no matter who you are or what you do — from 9-to-5 middle managers to astronauts to housecleaners — you cannot escape the tyranny of the personal brand.”
In the age of social media, marketing ourselves online may be unavoidable, but that doesn’t make it easy. Aligning our personal lives with a public image can be tough to navigate. What happens when we merge the personal and professional in service of the latter? And what happens when we – our brand, or our life – fall short?
Branding
To build an authentic personal brand, career coach Kara Dennison advises that consistency is key: a personal brand “should be consistent everywhere…Your messaging online should be congruent to your personal interactions at work and with your family and friends.” But while Pepsi on a beach is Pepsi in a boardroom, a person is not so uniform.
For example, we might swear in front of our friends at a bar but not around our parents at dinner; or debate politics when we’re off the clock while staying quiet in the office. According to sociologist Erving Goffman, these shifts in our self-presentation are part of impression management, a process in which we selectively share information or parts of ourselves with different audiences in the interest of managing others’ perceptions.
With a public online presence, however, there’s nothing separating friends from family from employers. Multiple, separate audiences converge into one audience in what’s referred to as context collapse. And when everyone is your audience, including prospective professional contacts, then everything is “in the office.” Every photo you share, comment you write, every piece of your life that you choose to make public. Navigating this blending of the personal and professional as you strive to build a personal brand can come with real challenges.
As Emma Goldberg writes, “Building a personal brand blurs the divide between an identity and a job…It demands that every intimate experience is mined for professional content.” Goldberg shares the story of entrepreneur Jesse Israel, 37, whose personal brand drew from Israel’s soothing personality and mindfulness practices. When he began suffering from depression during the pandemic, Israel’s personal life came in conflict with the public image he’d worked to craft: “‘I’m sitting at the dining room table with my mom, crying,’ he recalled, describing a period of loneliness, illness and career instability. ‘I’m like, ‘Mom, people think of me as a mindfulness expert and I feel like I’ve lost my mind.’”
The sustainability of professional success resting on personal identity is something Brandon Westenberg, a then-19-year-old influencer, says weighs on him when he speaks with writer Barrett Swanson. “The scary thing is you never know how long this is going to last, and I think that’s what eats a lot of us at night,” Westenberg tells Swanson. “How long before no one cares, and what if your life was worth nothing?”
Feeling pressured to have our personal lives fulfill our audience’s expectations, and conflating who we are with what we are worth to others, are natural extensions of merging our personal and professional lives – and experts don’t exactly discourage this way of thinking.
For example, Rutgers University urges students to live in alignment with their personal brands:
[C]reating and managing your brand ensures you stay focused on your individual goals to become the kind of person you want to be and achieve the specific things you want to achieve. Without this vision for yourself, it’s very easy to take classes and engage in work experiences and other activities that aren’t aligned with your goals. Rather than becoming a well-rounded jack-of-all-trades, success comes from identifying your "X" factor, your unique selling point that makes you indispensable, and continuing to build upon that.
Personal branding is an ongoing, lifelong process that starts as early as your first year at Rutgers, whether you want it to or not.1
Discouraging young people from engaging in personal exploration and growth, as Rutgers does here, sends two messages. The first is that your behavior should be guided by what sells you. The second is that your personal brand is authentic only insofar as you’ve committed yourself to living in service of it. (And as someone whose personal brand as an undergrad at Rutgers was “artist who specializes in drawing and vodka,” I’m grateful that nobody at my alma mater told me to only make choices that “align with my goals.”)
The brilliance of the argument that personal brands are inescapable, even in the face of the anxiety and burnout, is that it nullifies any opposition to their existence. I could come up with the best pushback against personal branding, but as long as a brand is the lens through which others view me, my anti-personal-branding perspective simply becomes, well, part of my personal brand. The best I can hope for is that I’m consistent enough to be viewed as authentic.
Living
Dennison claims that a lack of authenticity in our personal brands is “leaving us lonelier than we can imagine, all while trying to fit in.” Her concerns are valid: the less authentic we are or perceive each other to be, the more distance grows between us in a society already struggling with trust and loneliness.
But Dennison’s solution to the societal ills of personal branding – switching up our personal branding strategy – still traps us in the loop of branding our personal lives and living our personal brands. It doesn’t help a mindfulness expert avoid the disconnection of depression or an influencer avoid the fear of obsolescence, or let a college freshman feel free to drop that engineering class to see what musicology is all about.
Instead, I suggest we consider designer and brand consultant Debbie Milman's perspective when she warns that personal branding asks us to “forfeit everything that is truly glorious about being human.” In defiance of the inescapability framing, Milman declares: “Perhaps it’s time we leave the branding to the brands and the living to the living.”
That doesn’t mean abandoning mindfulness of how we appear in public or online, nor should it discourage us from celebrating who we are, living in accordance with our values, and sharing our professional strengths with the world. It means honoring – for ourselves, and for the people we meet, hire, advise, and evaluate – that humans are complex. None of us are one consistent thing over time (or even a consistent set of things). We are parents and children, friends and coworkers, neighbors and students. We succeed and we fail, we disappoint and we impress. Sometimes, our public image is in happy harmony with our private life. Other times, the personal journey that consumes us might not be Instagrammable. We’re learning and changing. We don’t always know who we are or what we want to be when we grow up (yes, at any age).
The wiggly, undefined, ineffable parts of who we are are bigger and more beautiful than any predefined selling point, and it should worry us all when we are expected to live in service of the latter. Because when our incomes rely on our ability to sell our personal lives for professional gain, to choose between masking or commodifying the quirks, convictions, and fractures that make us human, to live within the guardrails of what sells us and fear the consequences of venturing beyond, we lose out on the ability to just live.
Right before hitting send on this newsletter, I revisited this Rutgers website, and I discovered that the line “Personal branding is an ongoing, lifelong process that starts as early as your first year at Rutgers, whether you want it to or not” has been removed since my last visit (within the past week). As this post had been created in 2021, and this language appears to have been present since at least 2022, it still warrants discussion; but I want to be transparent about the fact that this framing may be evolving (hopefully, for the better!) in real time.
Excellent. This should evolve into a book, please.
Maybe my favorite post to date! Love this, Sara!