Personal branding is vain and vulgar, now you’re nothing unless you’re a Nike or a Marmite

RYANAIR, it has emerged in a recent survey, is the fourth most-unloved brand in the United Kingdom. I hear what you say, and it was my reaction too: What? Only the fourth? What three luckless brands have managed to make themselves even more hated than Ryanair?

The answer is UKIP, the Tories, and Marmite, in that order. The survey was conducted by an advertising agency, you see, and as far as ad people are concerned, everything is a brand, including political parties.

And that is how we ended up with a survey in which ‘consumers’ are invited to consider politics in the same category as a spreadable yeast extract.

They haven’t done the least-loved brand survey for Ireland but it might be much the same: Fine Gael, Labour, Irish Water and those pink biscuits with the jam.

A brand once meant a particular type of product by a particular manufacturer. These days, there are at least half a dozen definitions of the word, courtesy of marketing people. Thank you, marketing people, for the richness you have brought to our lives in the past half-century.

Loosely, it now means anything that distinguishes anything from anything else, and it applies to everything. Sell, sell, sell!

IN HER 2000 book, No Logo, Naomi Klein linked the growth of commercial branding to the demise of manufacturing. Instead of making goods, you import them cheaply from China and sell them on as distinctively your own, using consistent brand identifiers. You make brands, not products. It’s probably why all those companies are trying to sell you ‘ solutions’ instead of things. Not wholesome, is it?

Commercial branding is so important that people are willing to pay twice as much just to be seen with the Apple logo, London was placed in an advertising shutdown to protect the sponsors of the 2012 Olympics and debranding cigarette packets – the tobacco companies call it their ‘intellectual property’ – is thought likely to reduce the uptake of smoking.

But commercial branding is one thing, political branding is another. By these lights, politics is some sort of weird transactional arrangement between representative and voter. They produce and we consume. If they have an ideology, it’s worthless unless it will sell. And if they don’t have an ideology (you know who you are), it won’t matter as long as the brand positioning is right. Anyone else feeling a little queasy?

Nations have brands too. Think Cool Britannia, or the rather less snappy ‘Best Small Country In The World To Do Business’ (really needs work).

Brand Ireland has been under the competing influences of the tourism and business lobbies for decades now and the outcome is a little strange. The last of the leprechauns appears to have been done away with so the brand now consists of porter, the Atlantic ocean, a 12% corporate tax rate, and a well-educated workforce with freckles and the gift of the gab.

The FutureBrand Country Brand Index looked at 75 countries last year and found they were not all brands, imagine. Ireland is a brand, though, they decided, before placing us 21st out of 20. (Germany came first in the European Union, as it’s now credited with keeping Europe on its feet, which is a pretty good turnaround for Brand Germany in 70 years, I think you’ll agree.)

Ickiest of all is personal brand- ing, which we might once have called posturing and eschewed as being vain and vulgar but which is now regarded as A Good Thing instead. No one gets anywhere these days unless they’re correctly ‘positioned’.

Type ‘personal branding’ into a leading internet search engine (out of sheer contrariness, I’m not going to mention the brand name), and you’ll get more than 37 million results. It’s all complete instructions and top tips and lazy person’s guides (though laziness is not good – you want to knock that out of your brand).

BOSTON’S Northeastern University offers graduate courses in personal branding. You spend a semester or whatever navel-gazing, and at the end of it you’ll have your own personal brand, for only $1,800. Any number of people – including a plethora of companies and individuals in Ireland – want to take your money in exchange for brand coaching.

They all agree on one thing: there’s no choice about this. You have a brand already. Sorry, I phrased that wrongly. You are a brand already. Yes you are. You’re just like Nike. Okay, maybe Ovaltine in your case.

And if you didn’t already know you were a brand, it means you’re not honing and burnishing and wielding your brand properly. To do that, you must begin with some soul-searching. Yes, let’s play fast and loose with the word soul. Why not? Everyone else is.

First, forget those noble ideas about recognising what you have in common with the rest of humanity. The object here is to decide what sets you apart. You must identify your feature-benefit model. (It means what it is that makes you unique. Please try to keep up.) Ask yourself, What do I do really well? What do I like to brag about? What do I want to be famous for? Oh, I don’t know… maybe my HUMILITY?

Once you’ve identified your brand, you must market it. Sell, sell, sell! Photograph yourself endlessly; venture opinions on everything, whether you’re qualified or not; tweet or blog your every thought; humble-brag.

Harness the power of social media: present yourself as busier, more attractive and more fulfilled than you are (Facebook) and wittier, better informed and more relevant than you are (Twitter).

Don’t worry about nauseating your friends with this carry-on. Nobody is nauseated by that any more – they’re all too busy doing it themselves.

I’ve now done my brand and I advise you to do the same. Mine consists of unread books, abandoned hobbies, a marked inattention to personal grooming, dangerous levels of misanthropy, a hatred of being photographed and a bit of antipathy to the whole idea of branding if I’m honest… There, see how easy it is?

I’m now ready to position myself in the global marketplace to be consumed, like Marmite.