Creator Personal Branding

The concept of branding is relatively recent in the span of human history. For centuries, if you wanted to buy a horse, you’d talk to some guy like Wilbur Post and buy your horse directly from him. But by the 20th century, if you wanted to buy a car, you did not talk to Henry Ford; you bought it from a salesman who sold cars made by people that Ford employed. With several layers between the customer and the person(s) who created whatever it is they were buying, there was little emotional accountability and/or attachment. Add mass media on top of that, and you wind up with corporations so far removed from their customers, that they have to spend time selling their own image as well as their products.

The other reason for branding is for a single corporation to provide a consistent message. As soon as you start adding people to a group, the danger for sending mixed messages exponentionally rises. Each person has their own beliefs and values, of course, and they might not all perfectly align with the ones of everyone in the group. So people who run corporations use branding, in part, to help ensure that all of their employees are adhering to a single message.

But here’s the interesting thing: this applies to individuals as well. You might think that a lone cartoonist, just by the simple fact that they’re a single individual, would pretty much always project a pretty straight-forward brand presence. They might not have a logo or company uniform, but they would still, theoretically, present basically the same face to their readers. Their audience would grow accustomed to their update schedule, style of humor, speech patterns, etc.—all of which would help to make up the cartoonist’s own brand.

The problem with that is that we, as humans who interact with the rest of the world, are not single individuals. Think about this: how do you talk and act around your friends, and how does that differ from how you talk and act around your parents? Around co-workers? Around the clerk at the grocery store? Around the repairman who’s fixing your refridgerator? Around your significant other? You become a slightly different person in each of those situations/interactions.

What that means is that the presence a comic creator puts out online might run into conflict when they encounter someone other than their anticipated audience in that environment. A relative, an old bully from grade school, an ex… And though that interaction might be completely typical for those two individuals, it’s now on display for everyone else the creator interacts with. And if their interactions are radically different than what they’re seeing, that’s going to have a negative impact on the individual’s brand.

That’s how/why we’ve saw a rise in so many mea culpas in professional sports starting a decade or so back; viewers started seeing athletes in settings and interactions outside the normal playing field more often, and those interactions are at odds with the good sportsmanship ethos usually shown on the field.

All of which is to say that, while corporations pioneered the notion of broad-scale branding to unify how their audience sees them, it’s perhaps not a bad idea to try applying the same ideas at a smaller scale to coalesce the personal branding of comic creators. A set of rules and guidelines on how to act or respond online that can be referred to when an atypical interaction crops up. While cartoonists are less likely than pro athletes to be caught on video, they’re probably more likely to post something untoward online; and these days, both are equally likely to damage a reputation or, worse, a livelihood.

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