Package Deal

Personal branding is part self-help, part commercial enterprise. It’s the newest way to market your identity.

By Timothy Taylor

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Everywhere I look in Sketch – Mourad Mazouz’s ultrafabulous London restaurant – I find whimsical, innovative ideas. Ever-changing video wallpaper in the bistro. Unisex bathrooms with individual pod enclosures. And on the plate too, where a typical menu by chef Pierre Gagnaire experiments to the tune of smoked fish with coco bean chantilly and tuna jelly.

But if you wish to experience Sketch in this way, as a nexus of creative surprise, you might want to stop reading here because, as it is with sausages, sometimes knowing how things are made diminishes the pleasure of consumption. Take the neon light sculpture on the landing of the staircase: If I move my head from side to side, the neon ghosts out the word “Love.” Which would indeed be creative and surprising but somehow isn’t because I happen to know that it and every other detail in this place has been planned in advance to reflect Mazouz’s Personal Brand.

I’m not using the term figuratively. Mazouz isn’t like a brand; he actually is one. Sketch is Mazouz, his personality echoed and refracted through these shifting culinary and design ideas. And this blurring of personal and commercial is not just my theory. I have it on good authority because I’m having lunch with a friend of Mazouz’s, who is the world’s leading Personal Brander, William Arruda.

“Dynamic, innovative, creative,” Arruda says, summarizing Sketch/ Mazouz in one verbal PowerPoint. “That is the brand.”

Personal Branding, I think. Now here’s a line of work illuminating contemporary culture. No celebrity chef, no reality TV show host, no pet massage therapist better illustrates the Boutique Individual, that early 21st-century phenomenon whereby people increasingly define themselves in consumerist terms. (As in I’m a Michael Kors-wearing, retro punk-listening, Bookninja Blog-reading kind of guy.) Corporate Storytelling, discussed in my last essay, shows the attention companies pay to this tendency to wreathe products in a quasi-spiritual mist of invented legend, aping human behaviour, in effect, to get closer to consumers.

But when people undertake Personal Branding – organizing their whole presentation of self along uniform promotional lines – they demonstrate how individuals are closing the gap between personal identity and commercial enterprise. In their quest to differentiate and succeed, people are literally behaving as if they were corporations.

“You have great Google results, which is really rare.”

Arruda says this in our second conversation, and I’m impressed. During our first talk, I was in my Vancouver office, while he was sipping Frappucino in a Boston Starbucks between stops in Paris and Kuala Lumpur. But here we are in London three weeks later and, having agreed to take me on as a demo client in service of this article, he already knows more about my career as a novelist and journalist than many of my friends do.

This client-focused enthusiasm is part of Arruda’s job, of course. If you’re paid to hone a client’s self-awareness so that it might compare to the mega Personal Brands of our day – Richard Branson, Tony Robbins, Madonna – then you have to inspire. Arruda gives off a motivational glow. A trim, elegant man in a smart grey suit, he has a radiant type of confidence and a lightly tanned, business-class ease of manner that I associate with those philosophers of daytime TV. And, like those folks, Arruda doesn’t talk about himself much. He’s always turning matters back to the client or, in this case, me. My attributes. My goals. My “brand promise.”

He leans over the table, features enviably un-smudged by jet lag. “Personal Branding gives you permission to be yourself,” he says, his voice low and urgent. “We want to know what it is about you that’s amazing. And we want to use whatever that is to make you more successful.”

Arruda didn’t invent the irreligious idea of self-for-sale. He acknowledges the inspiration of Tom Peters’ article “The Brand Called You” in the August/September 1997 issue of Fast Company. But he’s riding the phenomenon to another level entirely. For $5,500 to $11,000 a presentation, companies such as Disney, Warner Bros., Microsoft and JP Morgan have brought Arruda in to preach the Personal Branding ethos to their employees. And while a one-off consultation like the one I’m getting might run as little as $500, expect to pay $16,500 for the full Executive Branding Package. Arruda doesn’t name these elite clients, many of whom no doubt understand that, like plastic surgery, Personal Branding is something you want to keep between you and your hired professional. But I gather that clients include the CEO of a software company, a fitness guru, a corporate futurist, a renowned chef and two of England’s “Top 10 coaches.”

Still, it’s probably the least expensive of Arruda’s services that best illustrates the mainstreaming of his ideas. For $33, you can have online access to a patented Personal Branding assessment. Over 30,000 people have bought so far, which is impressive. But that’s nothing like the plans for next year, when, in partnership with a company selling corporate leadership training, Arruda is preparing for no less than 1 million online users. Blue sky numbers, sure, but it’s staggering that Arruda can even plan for 1 million people who want to understand themselves purely as a commercial product, given how such a notion would have been received just 10 or 15 years ago.

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