Gen Y. Personal Branding. Have two terms ever been more synonymous with each other on the social web than these two over the past few years? From the moment Dan Schawbel launched his one man marketing crusade with Me2.0, it seemed that the new generation entering the workplace would combine social media nativism with Personal Branding nous to create an unbeatable alloy of competence, ushering in a new age of job search best practice and heralding the end of dinosaurs like me.

The Personal Branding track led by Jorgen Sundberg at the TruLondon 3 conference last month told me that this wasn’t quite the case. Indeed, there seemed once again to be a rather significant gap between theory and practice, between the evangelism of the Personal Brand-er’s and the surprising antipathy of the Gen-Y’ers, who we might otherwise have confidently predicted to be enthusiastic vanguards of the movement, rather than the diffident dissidents they turned out to be.

Gen Y – represented at TruLondon 3 by the outstanding students from Middlesex University – were hostile to many of the precepts of Personal Branding. There were repeated objections to the things we ‘knew’ to be true – that it was important to be ‘authentic’, that ‘consistency’ was critical, that you had to know what your unique selling point was, and that you had to sell it all the time. There was impassioned argument, frustrated dialogue and a great deal of shaking of heads. As witness to this, I could not, as some rather disappointingly did, dismiss these objections as the mere naivete of youth. It did not seem to me that it was a lack of experience or knowledge that drove these objections. Gen Y knew what Personal Branding was , and they didn’t like it.

Why?

I’ve come up with 5 reasons

1. It’s A Constraint On Behaviour

Once you create and articulate a Personal Brand, you automatically generate a set of constraints on your life. Brands communicate values, and, if you comply to the conventions of theory, those values directly translate into rules of behaviour that you must adhere to. Last time I looked, young people don’t like rules much. For Gen Y, rebelling against rules is recent memory, if not still current practice and we cannot be too surprised if they are hostile to the idea of yet more rules impinging upon their lives. Indeed, if we accept that the true value of youth is to test and break boundaries, then we need to come to the understanding that the doctrine of constraint that is Personal Branding might well be antithetical to the young people that make up Gen Y.

2. It’s Too Early To Commit.

Don't do it kids

A brand is a consumer shortcut designed to help buyers to understand what it is they’re getting. This is achieved by having values that are anchored into the product or service. You go to McDonald’s because you know it sells & serves cheap food fast. You buy Apple because you know you’ll get great gadgets with wonderful UI. You go to Wise Man Say because you know you’ll get slightly pretentious posts like this. However, no short cut ever comes without a price. and the price paid for the consumer short cut is rigidity. A brand cannot easily evolve, and it definitely cannot change – once you have established it, you are, in a way ‘branded’ for life. It’s asking a lot for young people not yet in the world of work to commit to something that cannot grow. And by and large, Gen Y doesn’t buy into the idea. They still have big decisions to make, and they don’t know which way they are going to go.

3. It’s Flawed

I’ve written before about the tension that exists between the twin tenets of Personal Branding – Authenticity and Consistency. To summarise that argument, it is essentially inauthentic to be consistent. Are you, my fellow humans, consistent? Almost certainly not. You have good days, bad days, every other kind of day in between; this is self evidently normal. However, the concept of Personal Branding doesn’t capture this dynamic; instead, it rails against it, preferring the static position of ‘always on’. Perhaps because the idea is borrowed from FMCG – where products were pretty much unchanging objects – Personal Branding struggles, and fails, to resolve the tension that exists between promoting a brand and being yourself. For Gen Y, this binary opposition feels like what it is – a false choice that is incompatible with a life that is as yet largely free of compromise.

4. It’s Too Demanding

Gen Y is embedded into the social web. Every part of their lives is integrated into some social network or other. We cannot underestimate how different this makes Gen Y to everyone else. For us, social media is considered a ‘tool’, a ‘channel’ or a ‘platform’. For Gen Y, it is an indivisible part of their real social lives. It may be difficult for us, but it is do-able to ‘clean up Facebook’, and deploy ‘Personal Branding’ onto our social networks because we built our social lives before Facebook took over the world. For Gen Y, it will mean compromising the dominant space they use to manage their lives. ’Personal Branding’ therefore, makes far greater demands on Gen Y, than it does for those who came into the social web later in their lives. In the end, it makes a massive difference if you first set up your Facebook profile when you were 16 rather than when you are 30.

5. And It Breeds Insanity.

Personal Branding is bad for your mental health. There. I said it. Consider this: if you are to convert yourself into a Brand/Product, you give yourself three choices, all of them mindfucks of some sort or other. Go for consistency, and you hollow yourself out by being consistent at the expense of authenticity. Go for authenticity and you will damage your brand by being inconsistent. Go for separating the personal and the professional, and you are literally splitting your personality into two by maintaining the artifice of a personal and professional you. You are indeed completely crazy if you think that any of these options are any good for your mental health. I suspect Gen Y is aware of this, free as they are from the separation of work and play; maybe they’d just rather stay whole human beings?

So, Here’s What We Are Going To Do.

No1. Relieve The Pressure

We’re going to stop pressuring Gen Y to get with Personal Branding. It’s too early, too rigid and too much of a compromise this early on in their careers.

No2. Find Better Language

We’re going to accept that the concept of ‘Brand’ is imperfectly applied to human beings. What works in FMCG may not work at all with people. Consequently, we need to guard against being over zealous in advocating Personal Branding and in the final analysis, probably need to find better language to describe the idea.

No3. Recognise The Utility

We’re going to accept that Personal Branding techniques are extremely valuable, especially in the marketplace of the near future, where everyone is going to be buyer and seller of services, and where it will no longer be possible to hide behind the brands of employers we work for. These techniques need to be learned and applied, but considered as skills rather than doctrine.

No4. Improve Our Behaviour

We’re going to accept that privacy is in full retreat and get used to the idea that people will once again get to know who we are and what we do. This will be perhaps at a level of intimacy that we may not be conventionally comfortable with. The answer is to adjust behaviour, rather than your privacy settings; in short, if you’re ashamed of it, don’t do it.

No5. Learn To Forgive Mistakes That Really Don’t Matter

We’re going to accept that we are human beings first, Personal Brands second. Mistakes are going to be made, and you know what? Those mistakes are generally OK to make. It’s OK that there are a few racy party photo’s on your Facebook profile. And that it’s OK for there to be a drunken tweet or three. We need to stop penalizing individuals for living full, messy and human lives, and maybe just welcome the development that we are just getting to know one another a little better than we did before.

Am I right? Probably, but feel free to disagree.

This post is dedicated to the all the young people out there, who we call Gen Y, who’ve taught me that a lesson that I had forgotten: that it’s OK to screw up