The History of Personal Branding
The History of Personal Branding
By: Jeffrey Scott Sherman
The basics of this article are simple we are looking at the history of personal branding. Personal branding has been traced back only 10 years to the publishing of Tom Peter’s “The Brand Called You” (article link http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/10/brandyou.html). While he is one of the experts in modern personal branding, the history of personal branding goes much further back, and was being done well before the age of the internet, social media and blogging. These pioneers did not have the tools we have today and the messages were not as easily distributed. In this paper we will find the true beginnings of the branding world, and the foundations that were laid by these pioneers that we have since made more prolific. We are going to look at other points of history in personal branding, some of the historical pioneers of personal branding and how the new frontier of personal branding is more reinvention than actual invention. We hope you will enjoy this examination and in looking at the history be able to execute better in the present.
While the Tom Peter’s article in 1997 is considered by many to be the first document about personal branding there is actually an earlier text. That text is “Positioning: The Battle for your Mind”, by Al Ries and Jack Trout. In a chapter of that book they speak of positioning one’s self and their career by using a cohesive strategy. While it has been a while since I have been in the book, a quick search on Wikipedia tells us that the Chapter is chapter 23 (link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_branding) and a search on Google give us the 20th Anniversary Edition in the year 2000 (http://books.google.com/books?id=3hjG01OzMGYC&dq=%22Positioning:+The+Battle+for+your+Mind%22&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=AjdBSu-aM42QmAf9pr2fCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4) meaning the original publication date was 1980. This moves the personal branding idea back at least 17 more years. However, I would argue that it goes back even further. The actual date in fact might be completely irrelevant, because I would argue that personal branding has been around as long as marketing has. For close to a hundred years, people have been building brands using their names and reputations to help make them what they are. For example, many people would think that the Trump brand was created by Donald Trump. That however is not fully the case, the Trump brand was started by his father, and as Mr. Trump entered the family business he grew and further cemented the name to what we know it as today.
This is an example of a personal brand and by company history according to funding universe, can be traced back to at least 1974. However there was a loose organization in 1968 as that was when Mr. Donald Trump joined the family business as President with his father Fred Trump as Chairman of the Board. (link http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/The-Trump-Organization-Company-History.html). So now we are back to 1968. There are other examples that could pull us back even further, the point being that personal branding is not a new idea. In fact we have sayings that prove that personal branding might be as old as any other form of branding. Those sayings like “A man of his word” and “A man is only as good as his word” show that tying a promise or feeling to your name is almost ingrained.
So now that we have established that personal branding is a relatively old science, the idea of personal branding is not as new as we might have thought we need to find those pioneers. When looking back for people that depended on personal branding, we have to look at names. So what names stick out, and before we go with Colt (for the revolver ) or Samuel Morse (for Morse code), those are not personal brands. Now the question becomes why, and the answer is, naming a product after one’s self does not a personal brand make. To be a brand one has to have more than just a name. There is an indelible mark left, something that sticks with someone and stands for something is a brand. A prime example of this would be “internet search” that is the name of what we do every day when we “Google” something. We however say things like “just Google that”. Another example is the question “can I have a Kleenex” when we really want a tissue, or I am going to get you a “Xerox” of that real quick when we mean copy. Google, Kleenex and Xerox those are brands and they are more than the product that they describe. So let’s look at a couple of pioneers of personal branding.
1. JC Penney – James Cash Penny founded The Golden Rule in 1902, but it was in 1913 when “the Penney idea” was formed and that was when JC Penney’s took off as a store. The Penney Idea is the doctrine of his company and is based on rules that James Cash Penney believed were at the heart of business success. (link http://books.google.com/books?id=By2_GFnFcs8C&pg=PA36&lpg=PA36&dq=The+Penney+Idea&source=bl&ots=tnUN_BlUZa&sig=s-NL6FGnRgb-cXTa0Hcl2uMX5ec&hl=en&ei=rUNBSoupOKHBtwe6gcWfCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6)
2. Donald Trump – We touched about him above and the history of the Trump Organization, but few can argue that the Trump Organization saw new heights under the guidance of Mr. Donald Trump. The brand itself is so strong that there are reports that large corporations even try to buy rights just to carry the Trump name.
Now, the statement that I made in the first paragraph about what we define today as personal branding is simply a reinvention of what was personal branding before. When a person packages the individual in order to create an image there still must be a substantive foundation in order to make it a true brand. That means that just because the tools are easier to use, and in most cases free to the end user, that does not make branding the individual any different than it has always been. In fact it might actually make it harder now that it has been in the past. See in the past when people like James Cash Penney and even Frank and Donald Trump were creating their personal brands there was a barrier to creating the brand and that was a cost barrier. In order to create a solid brand one had to invest in it a modicum of capital before they were able to reach a large audience. Now whether that is right or wrong is a debate for a later paper, but what it did do was create multiple check points along the way where people were able to critique the brand and help refine it. Now all of the refining and critiquing is done either by the individual doing the branding or by the public. When the planning is not done correctly or thought of in advance it can be detrimental to the brand. Another change has been the number of people attempting to brand themselves. Anyone now can brand themselves if they are willing to invest the time and that means the ambient noise is louder than before and the end user has a greater responsibility to check on those out there to make sure the experts in each area are what they say they are. All of these things make the reinvention of personal branding a true revolution in how businesses and individuals market themselves.
Hopefully each of you has a better view of the history of the art of personal branding. The timeline of personal branding differs amongst experts and the differences are caused because personal branding wasn’t really defined as personal branding when it was first started. Yet things progress and as the internet became a bigger and bigger part of life the ability to brand things became easier and more mainstream. This made it more important to define the field and bring about some semblance of consistency. Yet in doing that you still do not need to forget where you truly came from. So whether you think that the time line started in 1997 as laid out in the blog by Dan Schwabel (link http://personalbrandingblog.wordpress.com/2007/10/05/the-origins-of-personal-branding-10th-anniversary-timeline/) or in 1980 or even earlier, the one thing all of us in the field do agree on is that personal branding is in the now and only getting bigger as the social media becomes more mainstream.
