Wayne D's Blog

A few weeks ago now one of my Twitter friends started a conversation about branding. I meant to post it sooner but twitter has been quite unreliable over the last little while and I have been unaccountably lazy busy. I hadn't thought much about the branding mania until her brought the subject up. It went something like this:

sbspalding: Do you consider yourself a brand?

wdawe: @sbspalding Absolutely I am a brand. Also a force of nature and an agent for change. 'nuff buzzwords or should I add more?

sbspalding: @wdawe Follow up. What does being a "brand" mean? (stick with me now, I'm going somewhere with this. )

wdawe: @sbspalding A brand is a label for something i.e. restaurant that provides a generally consistent and predictable user experience.

sbspalding: @wdawe So would a famous actor/actress that is deeply type-cast be a brand?

wdawe: @sbspalding No, typecasting is not required to be a brand. A brand is a corporate representation of a personality.

sbspalding: @wdawe The core, marketable "personality"

wdawe: @sbspalding Correct, your personality, the way you present yourself to the world is your brand.

wdawe: @sbspalding I think you may find this panel discussion on microcelebrity interesting http://tinyurl.com/2tg259 Audio is half way down the page

sbspalding: @wdawe Thanks for the link, I'll take a look later.

The lightening bolt hit me, a brand is nothing more than a corporate personality. We want our brands to be predictable juts like we want our friends to be predictable. Little surprises are OK, big changes aren't. I think I'm a pretty consistent brand, a bit irreverent, a little bit unpredictable but not too much so. I'm not too worried about my brand image because I believe that you get what you pay for and since nobody pays in something other than time your investment in my brand isn't very expensive. I do appreciate my consumers though, you put up with my pontification and in the end find something of value in what I write. I know that most of my blog visitors come her for specific articles they find in the search engines but I also know there is a small core group of people who read everything. To these hearty few I salute you.