Today I'm grateful for the power of Brand

Branding is one of the most under-appreciated aspects of society. When most people hear the word they automatically think of the companies they see on Entourage (or Bro-ntourage as I sometimes call it. I’ve also been known to call it Ent-bro-rage and Entour-bro-ge on occasion. Those occasions are becoming rarer and rarer for some reason).

But if you think about it everything has a brand. Companies, dogs, buildings, countries and cities all have a brand. The idea of a “personal brand” is firmly housed in a particularly douchey part of most peoples’ brains and rightly so, because up until recently everyone who uttered the term was, in fact, a giant shiny-faced douche.

But whether you like it or not you have a personal brand — otherwise known simply as your reputation — and you should be constantly working on it. I don’t mean you have to frame every decision in life as “how would this look to others”, I mean you become the kind of person you want to be and the rest tends to follow. And depending on how visible you’d like your personal brand to be chances are you’ll have to broadcast it to the world to some extent, whether through Facebook statuses, your clothing, YouTube videos, Instagram, attending rallies, your friendship group, work emails, whatever.

But your North Star should always be the person you want to be, not the version you think the world might want. It’s tiring to have to second-guess what someone else might think 24/7, just look at most organised religions. They get so tied up worrying what some Almighty Watcher might think that their identity soon becomes that of the Almighty Watcher and lose all free will.

Building your personal brand also doesn’t mean consistently holding onto an opinion even in the face of contrary evidence, unless you want to be that guy. Your brand can be the “consistently open-minded woman” or the “truly ego-less man” or even the “woman with the fluid identity” if you want it to be.

I am nothing

A strong brand requires consistency, timing and authenticity over a long period of time and if you get that stage you’re afforded quite a bit of leeway. You can see that with companies like Tesla, where Elon Musk is universally viewed as someone who’ll forgo short-term profits in order to advance a greater cause. He’s never wavered from that and now Tesla stock is trading at very generous multiples of earnings, just based on that brand. This is how brands work. A strong brand attracts attention from consumers, investors and potential employees.

But that also works on the other side of the slope, too. If a company is seen as old, unsexy and technologically not very savvy no matter what they’ll do they’ll be seen as that. This is because it’s so hard to change company culture and even harder to change perceptions of that culture. So it’s easier for people to have faith in certain companies and people and dismiss the others off-hand. Humans like saving energy like that.

I’m grateful for the power of Brand because it rewards authenticity.