Peters said in a recent interview that with the bureaucracy gone, workers realized they could no longer rely on stable career advancement prospects. “I sucked up and slowly climbed up the ladder and sucked up more and it didn’t work,” he said. “You were as good as your ability to convince your boss that you were second coming.”
For decades, increased competition for business has allowed corporate brands to differentiate by selling stories as well as products and aesthetics. Apple’s ‘1984’ TV advertisementwas inspired by George Orwell’s book and about unleashing the futuristic power of Mac computers. Coca-Cola’sshare cola’ campaign positioned the beverage as the glue of the community. Peters recalled that his 1997 article was published in his Fast Company with a chic ad for the Procter & Gamble soap.
Then, as brands selling warm, obscure stories were fired one after another, and shareholder-focused policies eroded employees’ trust in their employers, belief in the power of brands shifted from companies to employees. started. Management gospel, like Mr. Peters, has encouraged workers to solidify their professional reputations by developing their own brands.
Dan Rea, vice president of Metropolitan State University in Denver, studies the issue of personal branding. His interest in the subject arose from his experience of being laid off. Mr. Lair, who is 25 years old, got a job in corporate marketing. It wasn’t the world’s most thrilling production, but it was a way to earn rent in Missoula where you can’t eat the scenery.Lair was hired in his summer of 1999. By the winter of 2000, he was laid off after the company was bought by an East Coast-based company.
“I felt stupid,” he recalled. “This was a company that branded itself very much as a family. It was built around two dynamic founders. I had this feeling of shock that this could actually happen.”
But he was equally disillusioned with the idea that workers should prepare for economic uncertainty by building a personal brand that would make them indispensable. It felt like what Sigmund Baumann of Sigmund Baumann called individualized solutions to social problems. And Mr. Rea did what many people refer to sociology to explain the phenomena of everyday life. He went to graduate school and studied personal branding.
For some entrepreneurs, brand building at first seems more like dopamine than drudgery. There is a thrill in the full exposure it demands.