#41 How to Unbrand Yourself

You can't be off-brand when you're not a brand

Catching up with Bonj over breakfast

Recently my friend Bonj asked me why I migrated to a new Instagram account. “Well…”, I stalled, wondering where I should start or how even to explain myself.

Usually, people create another social media account for one of two reasons: They want more privacy and the freedom to post whatever the hell they want. Or they want the opposite: to use it for a less personal and single-minded reason. Maybe they want to catalog their favorite art pieces. Or dump photos of their fur baby. Or express their matcha obsession. Or promote their fitness business.

My account is public, so it’s obviously not the first reason — but the second reason neither applies. If you look at my posts, they have no focus, no tenor, no theme. I share random things from core memories to favorite quotes to dog reels to — naturally, as a millennial — food pics. I use Instagram far less frequently now, but apart from that, there’s virtually no difference between how I used my now-defunct account and how I use my current account.

So I get why my friends are like, make it make sense?!

But Bonj, as it turned out, had his own reasons for asking. Scrolling through his profile, he realized his six-year-strong hobby had inadvertently dominated his feed: Action shots from marathons around the world. Flatlays of race kits. Screenshots of Strava records. Portraits of himself wearing the biggest smiles and finisher medals. Documentation of his training: tracks and trails and tributes to retired running shoes.

His account, to his surprise, looked like a runner’s account.

“But what about my non-running stuff?”, he said. What about the photos from the wedding he attended the other day? What about more modest moments like, say, the breakfast catch-up we were having right then and there?

I could sense where his head was at. Should I make a separate account for my life outside of running? I could also sense his disorientation. What had started as an account for Bonj In General — a place to post anything about his life — no longer felt like it.

Now, it was for Bonj the Runner.

Shouldn’t he stay on-brand?

What is a brand? “It’s the ability”, a college professor once said, “to occupy real estate in people’s minds.” I love this definition because it also intuitively explains why branding works at all.

To occupy space, you need to have shape. A brand takes mental shape by forming a “mold” or a pattern out of specific elements, characteristics, and associations. That mold, then, is repeatedly exposed to its intended market until their cognitively efficient brains register it and love it for being a mental shortcut. (I recently came across a work document that explains this well: “We think less than we think we think.”) A swoosh plus sports? Duh, that’s Nike! The color red plus that distinct bottle shape plus the sound of carbonated fizz? Someone get me an ice-cold Coke!

Look, I know those examples are old school. Personal branding — arguably today’s most influential form of marketing — as LinkedIn gurus preach, can’t be that superficial. Logos, colors, taglines? That’s NOT what a brand IS, you old, gatekeeping dog of a millennial marketer! Hmm. True. But personal branding is still the discipline of branding. The principles still hold, albeit in less obvious ways.

To build a strong online personal brand and, subsequently, a following, the cardinal rule is to have a focus. A mold. A predictable pattern. You pick one thing about yourself — an interest, role, skill, quirk, or even a personality trait. Then you dial that up on social media, consistently posting stuff that embodies that until the algorithm and audiences clearly understand you’re Andrew the Techno-House DJ or Joe the Dancing Dentist or Jenna The Queen of Nonchalance.

Voila. That one aspect of your sense of self has become your entire (online) being.

There’s this TikTok trend that demonstrates this phenomenon. "Recently somebody asked if being a dog mom is my only personality trait,” the narrator begins. "And of course it’s not. I’m also a bitch.”

@carlyrivlinof course its not

Tiktok failed to load.

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Influencers and content creators become strong brands and find their audience by dedicating themselves to their online personas. Consistency is everything.

On some level, I know how commonplace personal branding has become over the years, and god knows how immersed I am in this discipline being a marketing practitioner for the past eight years. Still, it’s startling to realize how much we’ve been indoctrinated by all of it. That’s why Bonj’s concern struck me. Here we have A Normal Person — His bio reads: Hobby jogger, 9-5 👷🏿‍♂️ with running dreams — who has no aspiration to fashion a personal brand or chase clout or niche down or churn out content, feeling an unwarranted, nagging compulsion to stay within the confines of a defined online identity. Bonj the Runner.

In his essay, writer Julio Vincent Gambuto argued that social media apps were designed to turn us all into marketers:

We chose our profile picture, just like a brand chooses a logo. We uploaded our cover photo, just like a brand decorates its storefront. We wrote our public bio, just like a brand broadcasts its tagline. Pretty soon, friends became ‘followers’ and things started to get weird.

It’s a fair analogy. But if I may argue: I think an essential part of socializing is introducing ourselves (some of us in more creative ways than others), and, online, we do that through our profile pictures, cover photos, and bios. Then we connect with others by capturing and sharing what’s important to us, what interests us, and what strikes us.

But then Instagram became a culture in itself. "Instagrammable” or “instagram-worthy” standards became social codes, and simply connecting on social media stopped being enough; we needed to curate. Then suddenly, in part due to the proliferation of the creator economy over the pandemic, our sense of curation evolved: Now we no longer curate for aesthetics, but for identity.

Cohesive visuals? That’s so pre-pandemic. Give me a cohesive VIBE.

Now the term “on-brand”, Gambuto explains, “is completely ubiquitous in our pop culture — meant to evaluate whether or not something you say or do is consistent with the image you project. Social media has made social animals into media animals.”

Before Bonj, another friend had asked me: “Your new Insta… what was that about?”

Well, it was supposed to be about my creativity. When I decided to migrate to a new Instagram profile, I intended to use social media solely to aid my creative life and writing practice. No longer was I interested in sharing my poke bowl lunch or every single scene and sentiment of my vacations. Or at least that’s what I told myself.

I was at the peak of My Personal Creative Renaissance, and boy, did I have a lot in my pipeline. I thought of Instagram-ifying quotes from my pieces. Or reading excerpts! I could experiment! Maybe write short photo essays or something? I could post other stuff, too, like dance videos and my amateur calligraphy attempts and food I baked and sets I styled, photographed, and post-processed because why not!? Finally, a creative dump for all of it!

But here’s the thing about experimenting and diversifying: You can’t expect cohesion. This seems so obvious in hindsight, but since I hadn’t realized it then, I tried to abide by the same cultural codes of Instagram. Here’s a list of some intrusive thoughts whenever I planned to post something:

“Ugh, I need my feed to still look pretty and put together!!”

“I want to post an excerpt or quote from my writing, but I get more traction when I post a photo of my face… so maybe I should always post with my face first?”

“Maybe this is a lost cause because Instagram is a visual platform and unfortunately I’m a writer and the best thing I have are WORDS. Why did this have to be my art form?!”

“This is never going to work because I cannot for the life of me pick a freaking lane I mean I’m sorry maybe it’s just not who I am? Maybe who I am is this scattered generalist who thrives on exploring just about anything, who I am is a personal essayist who wants to talk about anything and everything about my life and what it means to live in this world, so if I can’t niche down or show focus then what is the point of posting??”

I regret to report that these sentiments were often successful in their intrusion, paralyzing me from posting as much as I’d like.

Now here’s yet another thing that didn’t occur to me and caught me off guard: that what I was or have been doing is content creation. One day an uncle referred to me as an “influencer” (maybe because he saw me vlogging about my writing?), then another friend called me a “content creator”. It was so strange. It was as if I chose and wore and hence knew my outfit only to be presented with a mirror and then told, “Don’t you know what you’re wearing? What you look like?”

I laughed at being considered an influencer. I denied the label “content creator”, to which my friend shot back, “Then what are you?”

The truth is I don’t know what to call myself, except that I am, for sure, a person. And I miss being a normal person who uses Instagram the way normal people do.

Life highlights and little joys. My favorite things and favorite people. Discoveries and hobbies and sceneries — I miss celebrating all of them on my Instagram. I miss sharing photos I edited not because they need embellishment, but because there’s some vague thing I’m trying to convey. Perhaps a feeling? Or more generally: Beauty? Awe? Appreciation? And I miss the early Internet era where I didn’t have to worry about cohesion or refer to my posts as my “content”.

At this point, I’m aware I might be coming off as someone who’s against influencers or content creators or the concept of a personal brand. I’m not. For all the glamor and PR boxes, I think it’s a path that presents more baggage than we probably see or creators care to show. In varying degrees, these people willingly blur the line between who they are and what they do.

And yet, I envy them. I mean of course I also want a wider audience for my writing. I know social proof — a following — is a huge selling point for any writer who dreams of landing a book deal. This is the world we live in, and we all make our own compromises to navigate through it.

But in writing all of this out, I can’t help but feel refreshingly appreciative of my personhood. Of my whole, multidimensional human self. Of Walt Whitman’s words:

Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.

We are not brands. It’s not natural for us to be cohesive, especially if we want to expand ourselves and evolve.

And even if we were a brand, that brand will only be one of the many knobs that comprise our sense of self. One knob turned up on full volume, the sound most prominently heard. The heavy bass. But the bass isn’t the song, and it certainly isn’t what makes the song rich and melodious.

Today I’m a writer and dog mom and friend and daughter and advertiser and dancer and bookworm and foodie and hobbyist. Sometimes I’m an Old Soul echoing the wisdom of dead literary people. Sometimes I’m a Zillennial dishing out Hot Girl Tiktoks. I am all of that now and I will be many other things in the future.

Who knows? I might even become a runner like Bonj.

I might even become a content creator.

At a glance, Bonj’s Instagram is unmistakably that of a runner. But if you look more closely at his feed, you’ll see them: the other pieces of his self. He’s a loving boyfriend, a dog dad, a dancer, among other things.

I think those “other” photos fit right in.

I know now that I was trying to unpack our conversation because I needed to be reminded of what I hoped to do with my Instagram before I got swallowed by the quicksand of my own marketing know-how.

And what I hoped to do is what Bonj does: He captures, creates, and posts out of pure intrinsic fuel. Out of earnest delight. Out of devotion and a divine attention to his own joy. He reminds me of what Robert Gottlieb said about the value of posting things: “Publishing is making public your own enthusiasm.”

If you peel off all the layers of vibe and aesthetic and branding and validation-lending from our online lives, maybe it doesn’t have to be more than that.