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The Best ‘Branding’ Is How We Promote Each Other
Our “branding” is our public image. The Internet gives everyone the tools to self-promote to a mass audience, but, in practice, only those with the sharpest photos, the catchiest taglines, the cleanest paragraphs, and the broadest and most interactive social networks will be heard above all the noise. A couple decades ago, it might have been enough to purchase an advertisement. Today, even a million dollars cannot buy you a successful brand. It’s something you have to maintain and live — if, indeed, you want to go that route.
Thorough self-branding requires a huge amount of energy: producing content on multiple platforms, delivering a consistent message or product on a reliable schedule, responding in an apparently “authentic” matter to one’s audience. It can feel like a job in itself.
But unless you want to be “famous for being famous,” self-branding was never the goal. It was only meant to be a first step and an infrastructure so that you could get the word out about your true work.
It is especially difficult for “creatives” — novelists, musicians, artists — to brand our work because we often don’t know in advance what we’re going to create or why we’re creating it. The fashion designer Louis Kahan said, “Art is a journey into the most unknown thing of all — oneself. Nobody knows his own frontiers… I don’t…
