Personal Branding: Organised Lying for the Ordinary Joe

Personal branding ...

This is going to be fun.

First lets start off with the definition of a brand. Our good friends over at oxford dictionary define a brand as, "A type of product manufactured by a particular company under a particular name" (its also defined as "An identifying mark burned on livestock, criminals or slaves with a branding iron" which I think is far more relevant in todays Ghanaian society").

So brands are all about products & names.

A definition for personal branding does not exist in the oxford dictionary (for good reason) so i had to rely on good-ol-wikipedia for that. So wikipedia has it that personal branding is "Personal branding is the practice of people marketing themselves and their careers as brands. While previous self-help management techniques were about self-improvement, the personal-branding concept suggests instead that success comes from self-packaging."

Packaging ... so essentially personal branding is salad dressing. And i don't know anyone who opens a bottle of salad dressing and drinks it as a meal.

But the best definitions for personal branding comes from the Urban Dictionary (which has loads of satirical definitions which are oddly apt). It has two definitions:

1. What you create when you want to be honest about lying about who you are. 
2. The persona created by public figures or their handlers, which can then be marketed, sold and traded for gain by the owner.

At the end of the day, personal branding really boils down to how you portray yourself to the outside world and has very little to do with who you actually are. I have noticed how in Ghana the concepts of branding and personal branding are really kicking off.  I have noticed that all the examples given when there are talks on branding/personal branding are of famous people, big companies and the like. 

What all those entities have in common is success. They are all good at what they do and they are already known for it. Being good at what you do, or at least being famous/infamous, should be thought of as a requirement. Mensah Otabil and Afia Swartzenegger are, to me at least, classic examples of good personal branding.

On the other hand, A guy fresh out of university talking about personal branding makes me want to laugh. I think we should put the horse before the cart instead or running with the cart and leaving the horse behind. The foundation of a brand/personal brand is a great product. And if you don't have a great product then all the branding in the world would just be like putting icing on mud and calling it a cake.

Just the other day i was passing by Tetteh Quarshie and i saw a relatively large billboard promoting a "brand expert" called Sylvester Phish. I just wondered how he became a brand expert and what he has done to merit that. Hopefully there is serious bite behind the bark or else he would be a perfect example of everything that is wrong with the was we handle personal branding in Ghana.

In todays Ghanaian society, the well educated and well placed upper 10% seem to believe (even though they say they don't) that Ghana works like America or a highly developed European country. Truthfully to say we are a third world country with middle income status. If you dont believe me just look around and see the conditions people are living in and tell me that that is an example of "middle income" people. Our market and the way things work are fundamentally different and if we think we can cherry-pick fashionable online trends and think they will make a viable difference on the ground we might be in for an unpleasant surprise. To give an example to my point i attended the Occupy Ghana "march" last year, the publicity for it was predominantly through social media and the turnout was far less than they had hoped. Contrast that with the trade unions strikes where thousands upon thousands of people refused to go to work and were out on the streets to protest. Ghana is rapidly developing at an appreciable rate, but i feel that we are not completely ready for some of the things that are becoming popular with todays facebook people.