Becoming an icon: how to promote a personal brand with cultural strategies

Personal brands that embrace cultural strategies must understand promotion in a different way. Visibility is still key to their success, but prompting preference follows different rules. Promoting a brand that aspires to becoming an icon is about showing up in the right conversations with the power to raise the conversation on the fundamental tension that the public or a group is living and offer a way to resolve it. Brands embracing cultural strategies must be militant.

For a personal brand, promotion is the consistent, committed enactment of an ideological position, and myth-making is the instrument through which that enactment becomes visible and felt.

The logic of cultural intervention

Douglas Holt, who developed the theory of cultural strategies applied to brands, observed that a cultural intervention is a contribution to the public conversation substantial enough to shift the frame: a piece of writing that reframes a widely felt tension, a public position taken at a moment of cultural pressure, a case made in the right context at the right moment. The personal brand that intervenes well earns a different quality of attention. The promotional effort of a personal brand embracing a cultural strategy is ultimately about supporting the individual in nurturing the dream of a better condition, one where the tension they are living finds a resolution. A financial adviser who helps people plan for retirement must bring a sense of optimism and agency to the conversation about the future. The image of a serene, fulfilled senior life, offered with credibility and warmth, is precisely what myth-making looks like in practice.

Four channels, one myth

Different channels serve different promotional functions, and myth-making can be exercised across all of them. The model of Attraction, Reach, Networking and Influence that I have proposed in my recent book provides a useful map, and the logic of myth-making operates differently in each.

Attraction is about drawing the right public to you through the quality of the stories you tell. A personal brand embracing a cultural strategy must offer an ideology: the lens through which it becomes easier to cope with and possibly resolve the tension the public is living. Pieces, images and interventions must make the public feel recognised in their tension and offered a credible way of living with it. Our financial adviser specialised in retirement plans, for instance, may offer the perspective of being senior as an age of recollection and fulfilment, reframing a public conversation that too often reduces retirement to a question of who is going to pay for an unproductive mass of people.

Reach is about direct contact with a potential public, and in some cases advertising. The myth must be present in compressed form. An invitation to a potential client must carry the dream, not the service. The financial adviser who reaches out is offering the possibility of a life organised around tranquillity and fulfilment, with the resources to sustain it. That is what the potential client wants to hear, and it is also true: money, well managed, does not make happiness, but it removes a significant source of anxiety.

Networking is about building relationships with people who share the cultural territory you occupy. The myth operates here through the consistency of your position in conversation: the way you frame problems, the references you reach for, the positions you hold when they are tested. The myth must be lived in private as much as in public.

Influence is where the myth operates at its most durable. For this to work, the ideology must be anchored in what Holt calls populist worlds: the shared social realities and everyday reference points that the public inhabits without effort. A myth rooted in a populist world is immediately recognisable and travels without explanation. In the language of contemporary culture, it has the quality of a meme: it is remembered, repeated and passed on. This is not a trivial observation. The theory of memetics, developed from Richard Dawkins's original formulation, suggests that the most powerful cultural units replicate effortlessly because they fit the landscape they move through. Our financial adviser's image of a senior life spent in a garden, at a beach, or simply at home with family, is a populist world. It requires no caption. Everyone knows what it means and what it feels like to want it.

The halo that cultural positioning generates

Strong cultural positioning does something to the entire brand that functional promotion cannot produce on its own. When the myth is coherent and the interventions are well-timed, the specific expertise of the personal brand becomes more legible and more trusted. This is what Holt describes as the halo effect: the cultural equity accumulated through myth-making flows back into every element of the brand identity. The financial adviser who has built a recognisable position around the tension between retirement anxiety and the dream of a fulfilled second life will find that her technical competence is received differently by a public that already trusts her reading of their world.

The tensions we are living through will evolve, and new ones will emerge. The personal brands that build the habit of reading the cultural moment with precision, and intervening in it with conviction, will accumulate a kind of authority that outlasts any content schedule. Promotion, at this level, is about being the person whose reading of the moment the public trusts, and whose myth they carry long after the post has disappeared from the feed.