You are not a person. You are a product. This is now expected before you graduate.
Literal meaning: Personal branding describes the practice of treating oneself as a commercial brand — developing and communicating a consistent identity, value proposition, and public image across professional and social media platforms, to attract employment, clients, or audience.
Origin: The concept was introduced by management consultant Tom Peters in a 1997 Fast Company article, “The Brand Called You,” which argued that the decline of corporate loyalty meant that individuals needed to manage their own careers as brands. It was adopted by career coaching, marketing, and eventually by higher education — where personal branding became standard advice for students entering competitive labour markets, and LinkedIn became the primary professional branding platform.
The reframing of a person as a product to be marketed — transforming identity management into a competitive professional obligation.
The Appeal: Personal branding advice addresses a real labour market situation. Employers do look at LinkedIn profiles and social media. A coherent, visible online presence does improve employability. The skills involved — communication, narrative construction, audience awareness — are genuinely useful. For students in creative disciplines, a portfolio presence is professionally necessary.
The Friction: The market metaphor for persons has consequences. Curated Life — life as editorial product — is the mode personal branding requires. Highlight Reel is its content format. Imposter Syndrome is one documented consequence: when your professional identity is a performance, the gap between the performance and the backstage is a permanent source of anxiety. Research by Brooke Erin Duffy documents how personal branding creates “aspirational labour” — unpaid self-promotional work performed in the hope of future return, where most practitioners receive no return. The advice to build a personal brand is also, structurally, advice to do unpaid marketing work for your eventual employer. AI turns personal branding into a semi-automated form of self-presentation: profiles, posts, tone of voice and audience engagement can all be optimized with generative tools. But this also sharpens the authenticity problem. The more a personal brand is polished by AI, the more fragile its claim to being “personal” becomes.
Why This Matters: Personal branding makes visible what happens when market logic is applied to identity. Once you see yourself as a product, every interaction becomes a brand moment, every decision becomes a positioning choice. That is one way to live. Knowing that it is a choice — not a necessity — is useful.
Related terms: Curated Life · Highlight Reel · Hustle Culture · Imposter Syndrome · Creator Economy · Comparison Culture · Deinfluencing · JOMO
Read more:
- The Brand Called You — Peters, T. (1997). Fast Company
- (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work** — Duffy, B. E. (2017), Yale University Press.
- Do you create your content yourself? Using generative artificial intelligence for social media content creation diminishes perceived brand authenticity — Brüns, J. D. & Meißner, M. (2024), Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services.
- The Pros and Cons of Using AI for Personal Branding — Luttrell, R. (2024), Psychology Today.