I disagree with Adam Grant’s perspective on personal branding

Wharton’s organizational psychologist Adam Grant recently stirred the ‘personal brand’ pot given how people hold myopic and misleading views about the topic and, as a result, tend to see it as a not-so-desirable activity 🙂

This is what he shared.

The time people spend building personal brands would be better invested in personal connections. Products have brands. People have relationships and reputations. Authenticity is not about marketing yourself to create an image. It’s about aligning your actions with your values.

As someone who has written a book (though its sales and readership is not even—and may never, ever be—a tiny speck in front of Adam’s many books) on the topic of personal branding, besides the many posts I have written and the workshops I continue to conduct on the subject, I do disagree with some specific elements of this post.

So, here are my counterpoints.

1. Are ‘brand’ and ‘reputation’ different?

Seem from a product or service (corporate) perspective, they most definitely are. A brand is what the company positions the product or service as, and what it commits to an appropriate audience, for them to find/discover the product or service and perhaps try. When they do, the brand is assumed to be working.

But after they have tried the product or service, they would realize whether the promise of the brand was true or not. That realization, on a much larger scale (beyond individual opinions), is the reputation.

In short, we can assume brand communication to be about positioning and commitment, while reputation is about delivery and eventual credibility.

So, Adam’s 2nd line, “Products have brands. People have relationships and reputations.” makes it seem like products cannot have reputation and people cannot have a brand. That is a specious argument. Products (and companies) do have a reputation and people do have a brand, whether they want it or not, or whether they work on it or not.

2. Your personal brand and personal reputation need not be binary.

It is not personal brand vs. personal reputation.

It has to be personal brand + personal reputation.

Let me explain using 2 different kinds of people – people with experience and people without experience. I had addressed this part in the Contraminds podcast chat with Swaminathan. (Spotify | Apple | )

a. A person just starting out in her career

She could be in her early 20s and is perhaps in her first job. Does she have a reputation? Of course, but probably not (yet) in a professional sense. Her reputation could be entirely personal, from the people who have interacted with her – school/college friends, family, neighborhood, etc. If she had also interned at someplace or done part-time work, there could be some amount of professional reputation.

But what is her personal brand? In her case, her reputation is also her brand. If a stranger enquires about her (for a job, for example), what they hear from the place she interned at would be her brand and reputation.

So, can she build her own personal brand that is distinct from the reputation she carries at this point? Most definitely.

How? It starts with her defining what she wants her brand should be. What should strangers (who do not know her) know her as/remember her as? One part of it could be about her work, but a lot more about her interests even if she is not particularly an expert in those areas. She can build a brand around her interest and curiosity around certain topics (say, photography… or advertising…). Here, she is sending a beacon to the world (to whoever cares) about her interests. If she defines these interest areas as something she can latch on to career-wise and seriously studies those subjects in her free time to accumulate her body of knowledge, she could turn her brand into a career possibility.

But her interest signaling is only one part. It could lead her towards strangers who are in need of someone like her professionally, but she still has to deliver. That delivery is her personal reputation that adds on top of what she already has. If she doesn’t deliver, that also adds to her personal reputation.

On the other hand, she could decide that her personal brand need not be about her professional self. She could perhaps then share her interest in say, running, and make connections who share that interest.

b. A person with say, 15 years of professional/work experience

For someone who has a body of work, there is a significant personal reputation already merely going by the number of people they could have interacted with within their career till then. Then, the need for a personal brand depends entirely on whether you want strangers to know who you are, what you stand for, what you are good at.

If the answer is a ‘yes’, then they could start by defining the contours of what strangers should know about them, and then adding to that. In a way, it’s almost like you adding a designation and an industry/category in your CV once, and then adding to it every single day with some perspective on that industry/category. For instance, you say that you are the finance director in an insurance company. That’s your reputation, in a way. Your brand would then be built on your opinion about the insurance sector and the finance profession based on what’s happening around us.

Think of it like this – you attend an interview for another organization and the HR director asks you, ‘So, tell me what you think about the insurance industry in India being open to the fintech space that has no legacy of insurance at all!’. Instead of waiting for someone to ask you, you share it with the world yourself and shape people’s perceptions of you.

Most people with some work experience presume that their work will speak for itself. It sure would, to a small set of people (first-level connections and probably second-level), but it won’t shout for itself to the wider world unless they do something utterly pathbreaking… and this, most people in the world are not capable or, or geared to do. We just do our job reasonably well and survive. In that case, it helps to build your ongoing interest in the career/profession you have already spent significant time on.

3. Authenticity vs. creating an image about yourself

This too is not binary. You can be completely authentic and create that image about yourself.

I have written extensively about this authenticity question in personal branding.

To put it simply, you building your brand, on a topic you know/are interested in, is akin to you speaking in front of an audience. When you are addressing an audience you do not talk the way you are speaking with the person seated next to you.

You throw your voice.
You are conscious of your posture and body language.
You prepare what you are going to say so that you do not waste the audience’s time and make the attention worth it for you.
You are cognizant about the spotlight on you and behave like the world is watching you – because it is.

All these do not make you inauthentic. You are still the same person, but you don the stage persona because there is an audience listening to you, not just one single person listening to you.

4. Action and values

With or without working on your personal brand, you need to align your action with your values.

At its most basic, your personal brand is who you announce you are, every other day. Your personal reputation is what people see and realize about you and comparing notes with who you announced yourself as. If your brand is not aligned with your action and values, there is an obvious mismatch. This mismatch would go into your reputation too, and eventually nullify the brand you are trying to build for yourself.

Remember: you cannot fool all the people all the time.

It is completely worth spending time crafting your personal branding and making it known to the world. It is not going to happen with one static LinkedIn profile, but in adding to it every day with your ongoing thoughts on the topics that you want to be known for. The more you put in the effort to understand those topics (not master them – just understand them better, deeper… and mastery may happen at some point), the better the perspectives that you are sharing.

This helps you be known for something among strangers. Whether that is of worth to you or not is entirely up to you.

But when strangers believe something about you as a result of your branding efforts, you better deliver when they meet you in real life. If you don’t, your brand falters and affects your reputation.

In a way, the difference between personal brand and personal reputation is like the difference between social media and social networking. Social media is a broadcast channel allowing you to reach people you do not know and make them think something specific about you. Social networking is a messaging tool allowing you to improve your relationship with people you already know.

Personal branding, hence, is the broadcast of a promise, or a commitment, while personal reputation is about delivery. With broadcast, you cannot build relationships – the scale wouldn’t allow for that. But some who consumed your broadcast could end up building a relationship with you after being convinced that you do what you say.

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