Identity, branding, and persona

The idea of identity as a construction and a performance is central to branding. Top performing global brands have instantly recognisable identities that have been carefully crafted over long periods of time.

One of the main functions of commercial branding is to create or manufacture a sense of difference – to make a product stand out from other products. This is achieved by attaching a collection of meanings to the brand: it is a semiotic process. Brands work through association: they borrow and appropriate cultural meaning from other things.

A brand identity can also be changed when the associations that make up that identity are redefined or reconfigured. We usually refer to this process as rebranding, and it can be a way of reaching a new audience, recovering from scandal, or revitalising a brand that has been fading. Back in 2010, the award-winning “Smell Like a Man, Man” ad campaign achieved this with much aplomb for the Old Spice brand, bringing youthful humour and verve to a fragrance previously associated with older men. Audiences can even be recruited into the construction of brand identities through processes of participatory branding – this relates to what we’ll explore in Chapter 8.

‘The man your man could smell like’ | Old Spice

Celebrities, too, have identities that they cultivate and manage, as do influencers and public figures of all kinds. They may even lend their identity to the construction of a commercial brand through a process of celebrity endorsement. The most effective celebrities will maintain a consistent identity across all their public appearances, from films to advertisements to interviews to their own use of social media (or the social media content that is produced for them).

Audiences, meanwhile, can relate to celebrities through fandom. Parasocial relations is a term used to describe the imagined, one-way relationship one experiences with a celebrity or public persona, although these days, the imagined aspect of that relationship may be transcended if we actually interact with a celebrity, influencer, or public figure on social media. Nevertheless, the persona with whom we interact is carefully constructed and fabricated – as is our own, to a certain extent.

In the work of academics David Marshall and Kim Barbour, the word “persona” refers to the “presentation of the self”. You may feel that you have a persona – and perhaps celebrity culture has influenced, or even provided you with a template for, the way you think about this presentation of yourself. Barbour et al. (2014) argue that the idea of “persona” is more relevant than ever before because, thanks to online culture, “greater aspects of our lives are now involved in public displays, mediated displays, and a peculiar new blend of interpersonal and presentational constructions of identities and selves”. They write:

The idea of persona therefore encompasses the way we perform ourselves to others as well as the traces we leave in digital spaces and even the moments when identity is something that “happens to us” – the moments that are out of our control, such as when we are tagged by someone on social media.