Personal branding’s dirty secret

I’m gonna crack the code. A one-line definition of branding. I’m gonna do it, man.

Personal or enterprise, service or product, here’s my definition:

Branding is inspiring a shared vision.

Whattya think?

Let’s keep the conversation focused on so-called “personal branding.” Seems to me that your brand is about finding how your value(s) aligns with – is shared with – someone or something else’s values.

If you want a job, it isn’t sufficient to be great. What matters is that you’ll do great things for the enterprise hiring you.

If you want to land a client, it isn’t sufficient to be experienced. What matters is that your experience will bring value to their needs.

If you want more readership on your blog, it isn’t sufficient to be insightful. What matters is that your insight will actually help someone.

So my vision has to be shared by the person or thing I’m looking to inspire. It’s an exercise in listening and empathy (two very human characteristics, by the way… but more on that later). It’s about listening for clues about what matters most to the person or thing I’m looking to inspire, then demonstrating that what I bring to the table aligns with those values.

Change the order of “inspire” and “share,” and you’ll have the opposite of what I’m after. A bad definition of branding from the Stone Age of broadcast marketing:

Branding is sharing an inspired vision.

If you’re with me on this, then here’s the dirty secret. What’s behind the curtain of so-called personal branding.

Personal branding is just a re-brand of leadership.

Now, before your mind jumps to bad suits at Amway conventions, let me try to put some context around what I mean by leadership.

I believe we’re all leaders, that power and leadership are two entirely different things, and that hierarchical structure has nothing to do with it. Leadership is an act of humanity. We lead every day when we do things like make a decision in a way that demonstrates a core belief, provide hope to someone after a loss, or convince a customer service rep that giving a refund is in the company’s interest as much as our own. My definition of leadership lies in all of that somewhere.

My definition of branding comes from a dusty old book called The Leadership Challenge by Kouzes and Posner. It’s a standby book – the kind of thing brushed aside these days by those of us with iPhones and SXSW tickets.

But what makes this book endure is that the authors asked a bunch of people like you and me to think of a leader who we’d willingly follow, and describe the characteristics and actions of that leader. “Inspire a shared vision” is one of five actions that showed up on our lists.

I find this idea – personal branding is leadership – to be much more than a metaphor. It’s actually a very practical model. Tangible and directly relevant to human interactions. Roughly what Maureen Johnson might have meant when she said :

“Don’t shove yourself into that tiny, airless box called a brand – tiny, airless boxes are for trinkets and dead people.”

When you stop to think about what makes good non-human branding tick, it’s about finding ways to make non-human things appealing to humans. A commenter in a blog post of mine said of branding non-human things: “A good brand is a neutral “third space” where companies can meet their customers and try to shape their expectations.” That’s a gem, in my opinion.

And if you agree with it, then it should make you rethink your approach to personal, human branding. I’d argue that the strategies and techniques that have been developed with the aim of giving humans a space to interact with a non-human thing aren’t relevant for people. Good non-human branding breaks down corporate walls. Using these same techniques to build a personal brand runs the very real risk of building a wall of slickness and corporate-ness that then needs to be broken down. Why in the world would we want to do that?

We don’t need a third space. We are already connected to people because… well, we’re people.

The more that I’m willing to shift the way I approach my so-called “personal brand” away from activities associated with inspiring humans to interact with non-human entities, the better. Because I’m not a company, product, or department. I’m me .

Old gray haireds like Kouzes and Posner? Leadership folks? They give us the goods to actually connect with people as opposed to creating walls. An inspired vision that I share.

Image: behind the colours / CC BY 2.0