Brand New Day – Live – Wall & Street

«Today most people who perform in some way on social tries to be a brand of itself and for years now online and in-person courses, books and manuals on what is the personal brand. just to teach how to be. There are those who become brand of himself because he has to advertise or market a product or those who do it simply for visibility”. Elisa Rovesta, an analyst of human styles, explains personal branding, an increasingly popular trend, in the latest episode of “Wall & Street Live”.

One of the examples of Rovesta’s narration is Madonna. We know the image, the icon of the Madonna-singer, of the Madonna-character in the face of a personal reality that is certainly very different. Branding in the field of art, of music, is actually a feature of this trend. However, let’s say that a discrepancy can be created between what we see and then what the person in flesh and blood is. «I could quote Andy Warhol or D’Annunzio himself, an example of extreme personal branding. As for artists, I think it’s a separate discussion, they link their character to an artistic expression and obviously a Madonna song cannot be dissociated from the person who sings it, from the Madonna character. I tend to refer to “normal” people like me, for example, who either use social media or are helped a lot by technology to convey an image that is the product of a study and a desire to appear in a certain way. And I refer above all to the corporate world, where the brand has an importance linked to a product or a service that a company can offer, but that’s a whole other discussion and therefore it’s as if we people, we human beings, had also become a little industrialized».

But if the medium is the message, as he said McLuhanthe risk is that the same character speaks to us, without telling us anything except the affirmation of himself and when the character fails everything collapses a bit (let’s not say Chiara Ferragni but a concept like Chiara Ferragni gives a good idea). According to Rovesta, «there has been an extremism and aself-referentiality in the use of personal branding, very often an end in itself, not to convey a product or even simply a thought, but precisely to exhibit one’s self in a rather sterile way”. In the end, a question remains: “How can a person embody what can be a character decided at the table?” It’s a good question that the marketing world doesn’t always want to answer. It could turn out that the king is naked.

Gian Maria De Francesco