The beauty of not having a brand identity

A lot of advice nowadays for brand building is curating a unified voice across our online presence. As personality has become a selling point, there is an understandable need to fit neatly into one box. The B2C Distribution advice creator, the Finance guru, the heart-wrenching Writer guy. It’s easy to pitch an incoming newbie on your page or channel when you have a distinct identity.

When attention is more divided than it could ever be, the more niche your voice is, the better chance it has of resonating with the right audience. Like Blake Snyder says in ‘Save the Cat’, if you cannot state your log line, a one sentence summary of your story, you probably don’t have a good story. You need to know - What is the story, and who is it about? 

When we become brands, like movies or products, don’t we need the same thing? And aren’t we all telling stories? About ourselves, and about the world as we see it.

On the flip side, in the quest of being super specific, any dimension you could have gets lost. You are X or Y, and as soon as you become Z, it no longer is appealing. The stakes of your readers or viewers not resonating with this aspect of you are high. So it’s easy to remain in the box, become the extreme version of the guy/girl who does X. That’s why you see creators who start with making fun, if slightly unusual recipes, eventually transition into someone who is now spilling a can of spaghetti sauce on their kitchen tabletop and mixing the pasta in with their hands.

I personally think that there is a line somewhere between catering to your audience who is investing their time in you, and the things YOU want to talk about. There is no way to predict what works anyway. You don’t know what a potential hiring manager’s personal philosophy is on LinkedIn, or what someone who you went to school with 14 years ago resonates with. It is always a pleasant surprise when I write something and someone who I haven’t ever talked to, maybe just said ‘Hi!’ to, in the college hallways, messages me and tells me, “Hey, You might not remember me, but it’s cool what you wrote. You must continue to write.”

And that feeling only comes when you believe in what you say. Not when you are trying to be one person. Because we are rarely one person at all. We have multitudes of dimensions within us, across different timelines, in different circumstances. We are a collection of the people around us, of the content we consume, the stories about us we tell ourselves. Your brand is allowed to change, and evolve with you. You are not equal to a brand because you are not a product. Neither are the people you are writing for. And the best connections you have will not be based on your tagline either.