I didn’t put this behind a paywall. This work stays free and open for anyone who needs it, and readers are what keep it that way. If you want it to continue, become a paid subscriber at $8 a month or $80 a year. If you can’t, share the piece. That matters too.
Turn yourself into a personal brand.
Search the phrase and the instruction arrives sorted by popularity. A free course, six hours and twenty-two minutes long. How to Brand Yourself Like a Celebrity. How to Build a Profitable Personal Brand in Just 30 Days. A TED talk. A MasterClass taught by Kris Jenner. The workbook costs extra.
One woman, whose channel has passed nine hundred thousand subscribers, explains that the brand exists whether it is wanted or not, and that staying off the internet entirely counts as a brand as well, and underneath her the comments thank her for the clarity.
Personal branding is generally said to date to 1997, which is around when it got its name. Issue 10 of Fast Company, August and September of that year, page 83, illustrations by Alison Seiffer. Tom Peters opens by listing what has you branded already, the swoosh on the cross-trainer and the Starbucks mug in your hand and the rivets on the jeans and the fountain pen with the maker’s symbol worked into the end, and then he turns it around.
Regardless of age, regardless of position, regardless of the business we happen to be in, all of us need to understand the importance of branding. We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc.
Peters took the exclamation point as his logo, and by 2000 Fortune was describing the red one that traveled with him through the convention centers of America’s edge cities.
Sixteen months before that issue reached the newsstands, on April 14, 1996, a college student named Jennifer Ringley aimed a camera at her dorm room and set it to upload one photograph every three minutes, without editing and without a subject, and called the result JenniCam. Her mission statement described it as a window into a virtual human zoo. At its peak the site drew as many as four million views a day. Within months she began charging for the fuller view, and seven years later PayPal shut off her payments under a rule against nudity, because a life lived in front of a camera sometimes includes taking your clothes off, and the whole thing went dark.
Ringley had no word for what she was doing. The word arrived the following year, from a consultant, in a business magazine, and it was about your career.
The word was a burning thing first, a piece of wood pulled out of the fire, before it came to mean the mark the iron left behind, on cattle and on thieves and on people sold at the coast and sold again at the block, where the mark answered one question and never any other.
Whose.
Nobody has ever been branded for their own benefit. The mark faces out, and the one wearing it is the only one who cannot read it. A maker’s mark and an owner’s mark are the same tool aimed at the same third party.
Selling yourself has been on the syllabus before. In fifth-century Athens, where juries ran five hundred deep and a farm could turn on how a man spoke, teachers arrived to sell presentation. Protagoras charged a hundred minae for the course, which is ten thousand drachmas, in a city where a drachma was about a day’s wage.
Socrates charged nothing, and consider what that bought him. Barefoot in the agora in the same cloak year after year, while the men taking fees wore good wool. In 399 the city had lost a war and wanted somebody to blame for the young men who came back wrong. Two hundred and eighty jurors out of five hundred found against him, and they gave him hemlock.
The men who took fees are remembered for what they charged. He is remembered for what he refused, and for what refusing cost him, and the cost is most of why we still have his name.
At the trial he said that a life unexamined is not worth living. He said it in passing, in the middle of a sentence about why the jury would not believe him, and moved on. Twenty-four centuries have known it was the line.
But what, exactly, is being sold?
At a self-branding seminar in Los Angeles in 2010, a marketer stood in front of a paying room and told them the brand would set them free. The manuals agree on the definition, and it is stranger than the pitch. Your brand is a perception held by somebody who is not you, stored in someone else’s head. The property sits off site. You are being sold something you will never own. Catherine Kaputa, in U R a Brand!, puts it to women as a warning, that a brand gets assigned if it is not claimed. Every earlier arrangement bought a person’s hours and left them the rest. This one has no rest in it.
Meanwhile, on the shelf that barely existed sixty years ago: Be Your Own Brand: A Breakthrough Formula for Standing Out from the Crowd. Managing Brand You: 7 Steps to Creating Your Most Successful Self. Make a Name for Yourself: 8 Steps Every Woman Needs. Me 2.0.
Somebody is currently selling the Fandom Funnel, which has four drivers of superfandom, seven tactics to increase it, an offer stack, and a content waterfall. All of it lit the same way, by a ring in front of a face, leaving that little circle in both eyes. Another course runs its chapters as Consistency, Suffering and Resilience, Obsession with Craft, Delusional Self-Belief, Mastery, Simplicity. Now it is a genre.
Peters said the article started with a badge. Talking with an old-timer at Hewlett-Packard, he noticed the man wore his employee number, 129, where a name should be, and decided nobody should ever again be a number inside somebody else’s company. He got the diagnosis right. Then he told everyone the answer was to sell themselves harder.
There is a name for what that costs. Arlie Hochschild studied Delta flight attendants and bill collectors in 1983 and called it emotional labor, the work of producing a feeling you do not have because the job requires it. Deep acting is talking yourself into the feeling. Surface acting is running the display while something else goes on underneath. She was describing a job. Nobody thought to ask what happens when the job is being yourself.
Picture the woman doing it. She is four hours into a shift that started in Atlanta, her feet hurt, and a man in 14C wants a different drink than the one he ordered. She leans over the seatback and says of course. She does not feel of course. She feels her feet.
The smile is the part that gets sold, and after enough years it stops waiting to be asked for. It shows up on its own. One of the attendants told Hochschild her smile was not her smile anymore, and the women in that study were not describing a hard job. They were describing losing track of which parts of themselves were still theirs. As if the face were a room she had rented out and could no longer get back into.
In call centers and classrooms and on hospital floors, forty years of research since has tied that kind of acting to exhaustion and the other kind to nothing much.
But they got off the plane. She hung the uniform in a hotel closet in a city she had no reason to be in, and for eleven hours nobody was buying anything on her face.
Morning Consult asked two thousand Americans between thirteen and thirty-eight about the work in November of 2019, and eighty-six percent said they would post sponsored content for money, fifty-four percent said they would take the job outright.
A man who does taxes out of a strip mall films himself between appointments, in the car, visor down. Show your face. Check! Post consistently. Check! Pick one thing you want to be known for. Monday’s video got him seventy-five thousand views. Tuesday’s got fifteen hundred, and he posts again on Wednesday.
We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc.
The hours came out of somewhere. Out of the lunch hour, out of four minutes in a parking structure before a twelve-hour shift, out of the evenings the woman rebuilding sewing machines in her garage used to spend rebuilding sewing machines, out of the Sunday the tax man used to lose to the game, and out of whatever the rest of us used to do before we learned to hear a compliment as a metric.
Be authentic, the course says. Tell the truth, especially the uncomfortable parts, because vulnerability is magnetic.
They know his name. They know his daughter started kindergarten and that he nearly lost the office in 2019, because he told them, and it was true. He just cannot tell anymore whether he told them because it was true or because it would do well.
Nobody assigned him the number. He went and got one.
He finishes the video, checks the view count, and goes back in to do somebody’s taxes. Somewhere in the course there is a module on finding your why.
Each of these pieces takes eight to twelve hours. So much is locked behind paywalls now, and I want to keep this open. The readers who pay are what keep it free for everyone else.
If this made the pattern clearer, become a paid subscriber at $8 a month or $80 a year. That is what keeps it here.
Generally Said to Date to 1997
Tom Peters, “The Brand Called You,” Fast Company, Issue 10, August/September 1997, page 83, illustrations by Alison Seiffer. The opening list of branded objects and the Me Inc. line appear on that page.
https://www.fastcompany.com/28905/brand-called-youFortune described the red exclamation point logo that traveled with Peters through convention centers.
https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2000/11/13/291600/index.htmRingley began uploading images from her dorm room in April 1996, later charged for premium access through PayPal, and when the site went dark at the end of 2003 she pointed to PayPal’s antinudity policy.
https://gizmodo.com/jennicam-why-the-first-lifecaster-disappeared-from-the-1697712996The mission statement describing a window into a virtual human zoo, the three-minute upload interval, and the peak figure of four million views a day.
Sarah Banet-Weiser, Authentic™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (New York University Press, 2012), chapter 2.
The Fee
Diogenes Laertius records that Protagoras was the first to charge a fee of a hundred minae.
https://www.loebclassics.com/view/diogenes_laertius-lives_eminent_philosophers_book_ix_chapter_8_protagoras/1925/pb_LCL185.465.xmlClassicists treat the hundred-mina figure with caution, since the testimonia are late and uniform.
https://chs.harvard.edu/chapter/2-wisdom-for-sale-the-sophists-and-money/A drachma was roughly a day’s wage in fifth-century Athens, making a hundred minae ten thousand drachmas.
https://www.communio-icr.com/articles/view/why-socrates-didnt-charge-plato-and-the-metaphysics-of-moneyPlato’s Apology 36a supports a conviction of 280 to 220 out of five hundred jurors; Diogenes Laertius gives a different margin.
https://famous-trials.com/socrates/833-h
The Brand Will Set You Free
A marketer at a Los Angeles self-branding seminar in 2010 told the room the brand would set them free.
Sarah Banet-Weiser, Authentic™, chapter 2, epigraph and pages 58 and following.David McNally and Karl D. Speak define the personal brand as a perception maintained by somebody other than you, stored in someone else’s head.
Be Your Own Brand (Berrett-Koehler, 2002), pages 4 and 5, quoted in Banet-Weiser, chapter 2.Catherine Kaputa frames self-branding to women as a warning that a brand will be assigned if it is not claimed.
U R a Brand! How Smart People Brand Themselves for Business Success (Nicholas Brealey, 2009).
What It Costs
Peters recounted that the article grew out of noticing a Hewlett-Packard engineer whose badge carried his employee number, 129, rather than his name.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90600522/a-personal-branding-expert-shares-what-it-takes-to-build-a-successful-reputationArlie Russell Hochschild studied Delta Air Lines flight attendants and bill collectors and named the distinction between deep acting and surface acting.
https://www.ucpress.edu/books/the-managed-heart/paperHochschild’s account of estrangement, in which a flight attendant’s smile stops being her own.
The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (University of California Press, 1983).Surface acting, and not deep acting, predicts stress and emotional exhaustion.
https://journals.aom.org/doi/10.5465/30040678A 2025 meta-analysis across occupational groups ties surface acting to depression and anxiety while finding no significant association for deep acting.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001691825012181Morning Consult surveyed two thousand Americans aged thirteen to thirty-eight in November 2019; eighty-six percent said they would post sponsored content for money.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/social-media-influencers-86-of-young-americans-want-to-become-one/Fifty-four percent said they would become an influencer given the opportunity.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/08/study-young-people-want-to-be-paid-influencers.html
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.