I recently re-read A Brand Called You, by Tom Peters, for our Career Management class, and I had something of a strange reaction to it. If you're not familiar with the article, it's essentially an introduction to personal branding. I read the article for the first time back in the early 2000s, when I was reading through other Tom Peters books like A Passion for Excellence and In Search of Excellence (two must-read business books). It was my introduction to personal branding. I was a manager for a company called Western Inventory, and I really did take the lesson to heart (though I disagreed with Peters about loyalty to a company - I was incredibly loyal to my employer at the time), incorporating the concept of branding into my communications and professional development. It really did work for me at the time.
As I re-read the article though, I was really struck by how old it seemed. Peters was describing a world that used to exist, but which I no longer recognize. I've been sitting here trying to put my finger on exactly what it is that bothers me about the article, and I think I've finally got it:
Peters was writing about a period of time during which people only knew other people directly or by at most secondary contact. Peters was describing the need for branding in a pre-connected world. He was describing a world where branding was optional.
Branding is not optional.
We now live in a world where most people who have a meeting with you will google you before that meeting. We live in a world where the things you did five years ago are as prominent in a Google search as the things you did yesterday. We don't have a choice whether or not we want to be a brand; our lives, personal and professional, are online for the world to see. We are all brands. The question then becomes how we manage those brands.
And this is where I really differ from Peters.
Peters says: "the Web makes the case for branding more directly than any packaged good or consumer product ever could. Here's what the Web says: Anyone can have a Web site. And today, because anyone can ... anyone does! So how do you know which sites are worth visiting, which sites to bookmark, which sites are worth going to more than once? The answer: branding."
I think The Brand Called You really shows its age here. It was written before we actually experienced the web on a large scale. The web didn't teach us the importance of branding, it taught us the importance of substance. Millions of websites existed, and the ones that users decided were worth visiting, worth bookmarking, worth returning to, weren't chosen because of their branding. They were chosen because of their content. Google, Rotten Tomatoes, eBay, Amazon, twitter, FaceBook, linkedin... none of these sites were brands first and products second. The product came before the brand. The substance came before the style. The style was chosen to fit the substance, not the other way around. In a world where web users could pick and choose at their own leisure, they chose substance and content over style and branding.
And that's where the world of work has come. We are each a website (literally, in the case of our linkedin or FaceBook profiles). Potential clients and employers are our users. They can find out everything about us by typing our names in to Google. The more we connect online, the less control we have over what they'll find. We need to manage our brands, to be sure, but more than that we need to ensure that regardless of what our users find out about us online, that we have the substance to overcome minor problems in style.
(Image sourced via GIS and taken from No to the Quo's website)
No comments:
Post a Comment