When Everyone's a Marketer
The problem with giving power to "personal brands"
As a marketer (loosely), I’ll tell you from firsthand experience: marketing indoctrinates us into a perverted worldview.
Like it changes how you see people.
→ People become predictable. Without a thought, marketers say things like:
“People respond to...”
“People love...”
“People are doing...”
Who is this ‘people’ we speak of?
It’s a depersonalized way to talk about our parents, siblings, friends, that cashier at the grocery store.
→ When the group becomes large enough, they’re no longer people. They’re metrics.
‘Prospects.’ ‘Leads.’ ‘An audience.’ Another way to minimize complex lives.
→ Emotions get seen as buttons.
Marketers learn to identify and use fear, desire, and insecurity to drive some sort of desired action. Weaponizing emotion for profit becomes normalized.
A marketer can go home, hug their kids, feel genuine love – then wake up the next morning and strategize about which fear or insecurity to trigger in someone else’s kids to hit their conversion goals.
Shitty Side of ‘Personal Branding’
When success depends on visibility, and visibility depends on engagement, people learn to see others as a means to their success.
Like marketers.
The incentive isn’t to ask “who are they, really?”
It’s – “what works on them?”
And maybe “what works on them” is exactly what’s worst for all of us.
As a marketer who’s worked with personal brands, I know the playbook:
You can’t be for everyone. Find your people and ignore the rest.
You need a clear identity. God forbid you grow or change your mind.
You need an enemy. Define yourself against something.
These rules work for building an online persona. But they have tradeoffs for society.
Following the incentives.
People who master a ‘personal brand’ can use it to amass a ton of power in our world.
Elon Musk leveraged his personal brand to inflate Tesla’s valuation beyond all traditional measures – at one point having a market cap nearly half of the global auto industry combined, despite producing a tiny fraction of their vehicles.
Donald Trump turned his personal brand into a presidency. And he’s sustained it by never stopping – treating governance like a constant campaign, constantly demonizing enemies, and ensuring he’s constant front-page news.
But when personal brands determine power and opportunity, there are tradeoffs.
The brands that rise fastest – with the most fervent followers – tend to be built on polarization and oversimplification.
We’re literally incentivizing the opposite of what we need to solve collective problems.
We can’t build AI systems that serve humanity if the people building them are incentivized to “win market share” rather than get it right.
We can’t solve climate change if everyone’s incentivized to find the most enraging take rather than the most accurate one.
Humanity has accomplished so many incredible things due to our remarkable ability to cooperate. But the attention economy rewards oversimplification, certainty, and picking a side.
We’re selecting for the exact opposite of what we need.
—
You don’t need to be an influencer to be affected by this.
You’re affected when your news is written by people chasing engagement…
… when your politicians perform outrage instead of governing…
… when your family members have been radicalized by people whose business model is rage…
You’re swimming in water that’s been poisoned by these incentives, even if you’re not the one dumping the toxins in.
That’s the problem with everyone becoming a marketer.