The Boutique Individual: Personal Branding

PART TWO: PERSONAL BRANDING, Sep 2006

Everywhere I look in Sketch – Mourad Mazouz’s ultrafabulous London restaurant – I find whimsical, innovative ideas. Ever-changing video wallpaper in the bistro. Unisex bathrooms with individual pod enclosures. And on the plate too, where a typical chef Pierre Gagnaire menu experiments to the tune of Smoked Fish with Coco Bean Chantilly and Tuna Jelly.

But if you wish to experience Sketch in this way, as a nexus of creative surprise, you might want to stop reading here because, as it is with sausages, sometimes knowing how things are made diminishes the pleasure of consumption. Take the neon light sculpture on the landing of the staircase: If I move my head from side to side, the neon ghosts out the word “Love.” Which would indeed be creative and surprising but somehow isn’t because I happen to know that it and every other detail in this place has been planned in advance to reflect Mazouz’s Personal Brand.

I’m not using the term figuratively. Mazouz isn’t like a brand; he actually is one. Sketch is Mazouz, his personality echoed and refracted through these shifting culinary and design ideas. And this blurring of personal and commercial is not just my theory. I have it on good authority because I happen to be having lunch with a friend of Mazouz’s, who happens to be the world’s leading Personal Brander, William Arruda.

“Dynamic, innovative, creative,” Arruda says, summarizing Sketch/Mazouz in one verbal PowerPoint. “That is the brand.”

Personal Branding, I think. Now here’s a line of work illuminating contemporary culture. No celebrity chef, no reality TV show host, no pet massage therapist better illustrates the Boutique Individual, that early 21st-century phenomenon whereby people increasingly define themselves in consumerist terms. (As in I’m a Michael Kors-wearing, retro punk-listening, Bookninja Blog-reading kind of guy.)

Corporate Storytelling, discussed in my last essay, shows the attention companies pay to this tendency to wreath products in a quasi-spiritual mist of invented legend, aping human behaviour, in effect, to get closer to consumers.

But when people undertake Personal Branding – organizing their whole presentation of self along uniform promotional lines – they demonstrate how individuals are closing the gap between personal identity and commercial enterprise. In their quest to differentiate and succeed, people are literally behaving as if they were corporations.

“You have great Google results, which is really rare.”

Arruda says this in our second conversation, and I’m impressed. During our first talk, I was in my Vancouver office, while he was sipping Frappucino in a Boston Starbucks enroute from Paris to Kuala Lumpur. But here we are in London three weeks later and, having agreed to take me on as a demo client in service of this article, he already knows more about my career as a novelist and journalist than many of my friends do.

This client-focused enthusiasm is part of Arruda’s job, of course. If you’re paid to hone a client’s self-awareness so that it might compare to the mega Personal Brands of our day – Richard Branson, Tony Robbins, Madonna – then you have to inspire. Arruda gives off a motivational glow. A trim, elegant man in a smart grey suit, he has a radiant type of confidence and a lightly tanned, business-class ease of manner that I associate with those philosophers of daytime TV. And, like those folks, Arruda doesn’t talk about himself much. He’s always turning matters back to the client or, in this case, me. My attributes. My goals. My “brand promise.”

He leans over the table, features enviably unsmudged by jet lag. “Personal Branding gives you permission to be yourself,” he says, his voice low and urgent. “We want to know what it is about you that’s amazing. And we want to use whatever that is to make you more successful.”

Arruda didn’t invent the irreligious idea of self-for-sale. He acknowledges the inspiration of Tom Peters’ article “The Brand Called You” in the August/September 1997 issue of Fast Company. But he’s riding the phenomenon to another level entirely. For $5,500 to $11,000 a presentation, companies such as Disney, Warner Bros., Microsoft and JP Morgan have brought Arruda in to preach the Personal Branding ethos to their employees. And while a one-off consultation like the one I’m getting might run as little as $500, expect to pay $16,500 for the full Executive Branding Package. Arruda doesn’t name these elite clients, many of whom no doubt understand that, like plastic surgery, Personal Branding is something you want to keep between you and your hired professional. But I gather that clients include the CEO of a software company, a fitness guru, a corporate futurist, a renowned chef and two of England’s “Top 10 coaches.”

Still, it’s probably the least expensive of Arruda’s services that best illustrates the mainstreaming of his ideas. For $33, you can have online access to a patented Personal Branding assessment. Over 30,000 people have bought so far, which is impressive. But that’s nothing like the plans for next year, when, in partnership with a company selling corporate leadership training, Arruda is preparing for no less than 1 million online users. Blue sky numbers, sure, but it’s staggering that Arruda can even plan for 1 million people who want to understand themselves purely as a commercial product, given how such a notion would have been received just 10 or 15 years ago.

I’m confused by my cereal numbers, which have come as part of an Arruda-patented online Timothy Taylor survey that about 20 friends and colleagues have completed. I’m now going through loads of data and discovering – under the cereal comparison question – that people think I’m quite a lot like granola, Cheerios, Bran Flakes, Corn Flakes, Kashi soy-based products and steel-cut oatmeal. It’s chaos to my eye, but Arruda sorts the data with ease. He points out that every cereal comment flagged “a split personality thing. Corn Flakes, wholesome but somehow fun; Cheerios, pop culture appeal but still good for you; granola, substantive but nutty. Meaning you’re serious and wholesome, but then you have this quirky side too.”

Which I can accept. It’s not the worst feedback I received in all this anonymous input. Somebody out there thinks I’m arrogant. Somebody else likened me to a gas-guzzling SUV. But criticism isn’t the problem. As Arruda and I plow through our second hour of Timothy Taylor-izing and on into the third, it’s narcissism nausea that’s getting to me. So people seem to agree that I’m smart, creative, driven and charming. Great! But there are 80 other adjectives listed by survey respondents to describe me, and I challenge you to look at any list of 80 words describing you for 2½ hours and tell me if the page doesn’t start to warp inward and your vision begin to blur. I’m prepared (in the spirit of research) to pimp the ride of my personality, but where should I start?

I decide to focus on that cereal data, but not for the results themselves. (How am I supposed to gain category dominance with “wholesome but quirky”?) What interests me is Arruda’s rationale for the brand comparison with cereal itself – and car brand comparisons and soon dog breed comparisons too. “People sometimes have a hard time picking your personal attributes, but they find it easy to compare you to another brand,” explains Arruda.

In other words, corporate brands have moved so close to consumers in the guise of personal relationship that we’re now just as likely to describe real people in terms of brands (he’s a Volvo or a cocker spaniel) as we would be to use the language of people (he’s dependable). No wonder General Mills was quoted in The New York Times Magazine describing consumer loyalty to Cheerios as being “beyond reason.” It is beyond reason just as love is beyond reason. Consumers love Cheerios as they might a human character, which is why General Mills hired the Portland firm Character to work on the brand in the first place. And right here, on the topic of love and branding, I have the sense of watching Tom Peters’ seminal idea do a trick like a snake swallowing its own tail.

“Branding is all about emotion,” Arruda explains. “It really is. Do people love you? What makes you lovable?” Indeed, Arruda often uses something he calls the love-hate index to evaluate the power of a brand. “I do it all the time – go into Google and type, ‘I love Starbucks’ and ‘I hate Starbucks’ or ‘I love Apple’ and ‘I hate Apple’ or ‘I love Target’ and ‘I hate Target,’ and there are millions of results. That’s the connection between branding and emotion.”

And this is important, he continues, because emotional factors drive even the most rational business decisions. A survey at IBM and Lotus revealed that IT executives – described by Arruda as “conservative, structured thinkers, introverted” – made investments based on emotional brand attributes: “what makes me look good, what makes me popular.” And if those are the qualities people look for in cars and cereals and mainframe computers, says Arruda, reaching his climax, “who better to deliver on emotion than people? We are naturals for the branding process.”

So this is where we’ve arrived. People want to fall in love. People brand products to give them human character. People fall in love with the branded products that have human character. Then other people start branding themselves like products that have human character in order to make other people fall in love with them just like they did with those products.

I part with Arruda exhausted, truthfully. Marathon self-analysis is taxing. So too the high-concept Sketch, with its innovative toilets and interactive light sculptures. But what’s weighing on me more is a question: What would happen if everybody were personally branded, unifying individual identity and commercial undertaking in the culture at large? Wouldn’t everybody then assume everybody else to be on-brand all the time? And in that case, wouldn’t everybody also understand that all the “Love” floating around, ghosted in the air, was actually a neon optical illusion?

I go find a pub to ponder matters. The following, I could not have made up. On tap at the bar, I find Timothy Taylor’s Landlord ale (timothy-taylor.co.uk). From my seat at the window, I spy just down the way the Timothy Taylor Gallery (timothytaylorgallery.com). I think two thoughts. First, this is a Joey Skaggs-style art prank at my expense. Then, more reasonably, this is a cosmic signal not to worry much about my earlier question. The commercial and the personal may indeed mingle, even fuse. We three Timothy Taylors, for that matter, could merge. Rationalize the Timothy Taylor brand once and for all (although no talks are in progress at the moment). But there will always have been the originating three of us, unique and infinitesimally differentiated, lovable or otherwise. And that, being a matter of birthright, could not be smoothed away with even the most ambitious branding program.

It’s a toast-worthy reassurance. And I raise my glass to it.