Why Are Personal Brands so Bland?

& what if allowed our personal brands to be just a little bit messier?

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It feels like everyone has a ‘personal brand’ these days. As our screen time gradually ticks up and up, our digital presence becomes a more intrinsic part of our world. We get to exercise a lot of control over our digital identities, effectively picking and choosing which parts of our lives to share like we’re creating a character that’s loosely based on us in the Sims.

Most of the time, this encourages us to put our best foot forward. Unlike our irl selves which can be tired and moody, make awkward jokes, and spill coffee, our digital selves tend to resemble a more perfect, polished version. It’s still you, of course – we must be #authentic, after all – but swap the awkward jokes for witty tweets and subtly edited Instagram photos.

Our online selves also tend to be quite consistent. By which I mean that most people who regularly post online and garner some attention beyond their immediate friends and family tend to post similar sorts of things over time – be it their aspirational morning routine, rambly posts about being a twenty-something, or even just the same filter in all photos. Think of any online creator that you follow, no matter how large or small. Do any themes or associations come to mind when you think about their content? Bingo – you’ve pinned down their personal brand, or at least your perception of it

As a society, we’ve talked about how our deliberate curation of picture-perfect online lives isn’t great because it sets unrealistic standards and makes people feel bad about themselves. But I have a slightly different gripe with personal brands today: namely, that their consistency tends to make them a bit boring. And what’s curious about this is that it seem to be a design feature, rather than a bug.

Allow me to explain. Have you ever discovered an online creator that you instantly become obsessed with? As someone who is online a lot, this happens to me pretty often. One day I happen upon a particularly funny tweet, a travel vlog that piques my wanderlust, or a particularly thoughtful essay, and suddenly I’m on their profile scrolling through content all the way back to 2013, keen to see more but also just to learn about their life story and how they ended up making such cool content in the first place.

In the following few days, I eagerly devour all their latest updates. But then, bit by bit, the infatuation fades and I get progressively bored. Not because the content is bad at all, but more often because it feels like they post the same things again and again every day. After a while, I just feel like I get it. I’ve seen the trendy ice roller, the encouragements to practice self-care, the hard yet aesthetically pleasing workout, or whatever it may be. I’ve consumed their personal brand so completely that it feels like there’s nothing left.

The challenge is that social media encourages and rewards consistency. One of the first pieces of advice you see in any guide to starting a blog or an Instagram account or a YouTube channel is to figure out your niche and double down on it. You want to become the person who immediately comes to mind when that topic is brought up. You want to develop your own unique style or expertise that people learn to associate with you, rather than becoming some sort of digital jack-of-all-trades.

Of course, there are plenty of creators who hone in on a niche and still manage to make each post feel fresh, interesting, and original. But by and large, I’ve noticed that the people I gravitate towards online tend to be those whose personal brand can’t neatly be summarized in one sentence. The “come for the X, stay for the Y” type of people, who are open to trying new things and taking you along for the ride, with multi-hyphenate personal brands that don’t fit in one a box. I might not love 100% of their content, but I’m always curious to see what they’re up to because they’re always doing lots of different things, and you never totally know what to expect.

As I’ve come to realize, doing this well is also really hard. I recently started a running Instagram account (more on that below, if you’re curious), and found out first hand how difficult it is to come up with original and creative ideas that fit my description above for an account devoted to, well, running. Which makes it all the more impressive to me that there are people out there who do this incredibly well, regularly coming up with interesting, nuanced, and diverse content. Following them feels like a constant process of discovery: you always get to learn something new about the world, about the creator’s own experiences, or maybe even about yourself.

We’ve been curating digital content and creating our online brands for a while now. Gone are the days of actually candid photos and typo-ridden Twitter takes posted after a boozy night out – our online spaces now feel perfectly polished and carefully thought-through. But no one is so perfectly consistent in real life. Surely even the most disciplined wellness influencers are tempted to have a rest day or a greasy meal from time to time, and even the most insightful Substack writers have a silly half-baked thought every now and again?!

More importantly, a lack of consistency is not just about showing imperfection, but also about showing a diversity of interests. I suspect that most of us are curious and passionate about many different things that don’t neatly fit into one box, brand, or archetype. If I want to get to know you, I want to learn about your main thing, but also about all your side hustles and hobbies and guilty pleasures and random interests that make your life feel more full.

Our diversity of interests is discordant and messy and frequently makes no sense when we put it all together. It’s not easy to package up into a shiny, polished personal brand. But to me, this diversity is exactly what makes us interesting, what makes us human.

Of course, no one is entitled to have access to our full selves, be it online or in person. It’s always up to you to figure out how much you want to share, and it’s perfectly valid to keep some parts of your life private. But at the end of the day, I feel like fine-tuning your personal brand too much can run the risk of making it a bit bland. For many of us, our actual selves are a little all over the place. It could be more fun if our personal brands reflected this too.

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This is totally just my opinion so I’m curious to hear what you think – do you prefer to follow people who post similar content all the time, or those who are a bit all over the place?

ALSO, the running Instagram account! Going with the theme of this post, running is another random thing I like to do besides writing about being a twenty-something. I’m not very good at it: I’m very slow, for instance, and I have no clue how to train properly or anything like that. But I enjoy it a lot, so I’ve signed up for my first ever marathon in Chicago this October! I’m excited but also extremely daunted by it, because I’ve never run anything close to that distance. So I decided to start an Instagram page to keep myself accountable and document the experience (if pretending to be an Instagram influencer is what it takes for me to commit to running that much, SO BE IT). I mostly post nice views from my runs (in New York and Chicago so far, plus a couple of other exciting locations to follow this summer), training updates, food, and complaints about how much my legs hurt. Check it out at sofia.runs.chicago on Instagram if you like!