Humans aren’t brands

An interviewer asked Debbie Millman:

“What advice do you give to people when they’re trying to figure out what their brand is?”

Debbie is a brand strategist who has worked with some of the world’s biggest brands. She’s an author and host of Design Matters, where she’s spent twenty years studying how the world’s most creative people build their careers.

“I don’t believe that people should be working on their personal brand. I actually find that to be somewhat reprehensible.”

A brand is an inanimate object, like a chair. Humans project meaning, and sometimes personality, onto the brand.

But brands are not humans.

We’re living, breathing entities with souls. We’re messy and imperfect.

“Once we start to position ourselves as a brand, then we begin to lose all the wonderful things that make us human. Now, we can own brands. We can direct brands, we can manage brands, we can design brands. But the minute we begin to see ourselves as brands, we become a commodity.” Debbie Millman

What does it mean to become a commodity?

You drift from subject to subject within a category, looking for what gets the most engagement. Never drifting outside the category, but always surfing along the surface.

Using engagement as a measure of resonance. But algorithms reward what’s broad, shallow, and easy to consume. The closer you get to that, the more likes you get, so that’s what you make.

It’s a media business with your face as the logo.

People reward you for your fame, not for what got you famous.

So you monetise the only thing you've actually built: the audience. Courses, speaking, sponsorships. Because the content is too shallow to position you as a deep expert in the thing you actually deliver, and it’s too broad to attract the people who’d buy it.

That’s personal branding, but it’s not how experts build authority

They’re not focused on engagement. They’re focused on solving a painful frustration in the same way an engineer might approach a structural challenge.

They identify a frustration that a particular group of people would pay to solve.

They craft a meaningful solution to that frustration, which can take time.

They publicly document their process and thinking on both.

They do it in their own voice, not a manufactured one. Not because authenticity is a strategy, but because the way you communicate is a sample of what it's like to work with you. It attracts the right people naturally.

Do that consistently and for a sustained period of time, and you begin attracting the people who suffer from that frustration. Some of whom would pay you to solve it.

Each piece of content naturally relates to the thing you sell. There’s no gap between what you publish and what you offer.

“What I suggest that humans work on is building their character, and building their reputation, and building their body of work.” Debbie Millman

That’s the work of an authority.