People are not brands

Comment by Mark Ritson; adapted from https://www.brandingstrategyinsider.com/branding-debate-are-people-brands/#.XmCi7cSNyUk

It’s a common error to assume that people, countries and cities are all brands. Yes, they all possess symbolic meaning, but as I point out in my post, so do road signs. The point is that brands are more than just a cluster of meanings. On the consumer side you have to be able to purchase them and own them, on the organizational side you have to be able to control and alter them if you so choose. Neither applies to people.

There is another important rationale for rejecting people as brands. To do so would be to commit what Marx called “the commodification of self”. When we turn people into brands, their humanity is lost. Yes, we use people to sell brands, but when we start to use the literature on brands to sell people, we forget the essential humanity that sets apart people from things.

This terrible literature that teaches people to market themselves or brand themselves asks people to become products, and in doing so, asks them to forget the things that make human beings very different from baked beans.

I am all for brands, I spend my life working on them, but it is a fundamental and very common mistake to assume we can apply our knowledge to the sociology and psychology of the human condition. For both theoretical, practical and philosophical reasons it makes no sense.