Faking authenticity

As part of my tireless commitment to self-fulfilment, corporate conformity and brown-nosing senior management, yesterday I attended a 'personal branding' 'workshop' at the behest of my employers, presented by a perfectly harmless but strangely uninspiring woman. Topics were the usual pseudo-psychological guff about finding your 'inner' 'authentic' 'core', and learning how to make an impression - as a way of differentiating yourself from everyone else.

Now, since last year's series of The apprentice, it is of course laughably, contemptibly easy to be disparaging about anyone peddling a way to 'market' yourself as 'a brand', so I tried not to be too dismissive. 'You get out what you put in,' after all - though it is surely no coincidence that you will most often hear this from the lips of people who are peddling the bleeding obvious in a slightly mystical way.


Stuart Baggs the brand. He is no Liz Locke.

Still, apart from reinforcing my impression that 95% of the world neither knows nor cares how to dress - even those who set themselves up as authorities on the matter - I discovered that I would look good in a fuschia pink tie. I have no intention of testing that hypothesis, of course; but, as our American friends might ask, Who knew?

The handouts included an actually rather good basic guide to business dressing, albeit with some unintentionally hilarious recommendations for shirt makers, and the apparent belief that any item of clothing more than five years old will be 'dated'. As Professor Yaffle would no doubt remark, fiddlesticks and flapdoodle.

But ultimately these sort of things collapse under their own contradiction: if everyone did what the 'workshop' recommended - polished their shoes, brushed their hair, wore the right colour for their skin tone etc - then everyone would be 'memorable', and then none of them would be.

That reinforced also a feeling of unease I have entertained since starting this venture. Thank goodness it will never happen, of course; but if everyone began dressing well, where would that leave me?

ps Posting has been light this past month, and I have as a result been haemorrhaging reader. I have just changed jobs and the IT policy in my new office is considerably stricter than at my previous workplace, which means I am forced to post when at home, and, with a two-year old and eleven-week old under the same roof, circumstances rarely permit.