“ I am not saying that it is a bad or dishonest thing to try to sell your work. It is not. What I am saying is that I am tired of the rush to commodify everything, to turn everything into products, including people. I don’t want a brand, because a brand limits me. A brand says I will churn out the same thing over and over. Which I won’t, because I am weird.”
Maureen Johnson has written a manifest against personal branding. It is lovely and refreshing. Go read it.
I’ve written it in countless presentations: a brand is a stand-in for real, human connection when real, human connection is impossible. You don’t know the people who make Coca-Cola. But you can be ‘friends’ with the brand. Coke, Ikea, Apple, etc need brands because their products are sold a scale that is too large for them to individually address. So their brand, their watered down human connection, acts as a proxy. (In a way, it’s kind of like a robot.)
Why someone would want to reduce their real, human connections and become a brand is beyond me. Sure, it makes you easier to scale throughout media, but it threatens to make all future interactions flat, defined by the light, portable version of yourself.
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