Branding and identity
Over the past week, I’ve been designing a flyer for piano lessons - right now, I’m collecting feedback and making adjustments before printing. As I’ve worked on the design and read more about business in general, I’ve grown more curious about branding as a form of identity. When we read Hobbes’ Leviathan at St. John’s, I remember being struck by Hobbes’ description of a person at the beginning of chapter 16:
A person is he, “whose words or actions are considered, either as his own, or as representing the words or actions of another man, or of any other thing, to whom they are attributed, whether truly or by fiction".
When they are considered as his own, then he is called a “natural person:” and when they are considered as representing the words and actions of another, then he is a “feigned” or “artificial person.”
What?? Hobbes has already spent several chapters describing the human being and its (in his vision) mechanistic workings. So ‘man’ and ‘person’ are different things: ‘man’ as the biological being, and ‘person’ as his outward appearance/reputation.
Back to piano lesson flyers: in describing them to a friend yesterday (and thanks to the strong feedback of another friend earlier in the day), I realized that the branding was quite different than what I’d set up elsewhere. The flyers tried to be playful and quirky, while my online social media/freelance profiles were more serious and professional (I’d say the website is somewhere in between). But what was the collective identity that all of these different sources portrayed, and was it true to my own identity as a human being? As a musician? A piano teacher?
Does it sound like I have any answers here? Nada. But I am captivated by the idea and implications of branding on identity. Household brands don’t represent single persons, but companies - wait, a company and its brand are different things? In what instance would we consider the executive as his own brand, separate from his identity?
In conclusion - what is the origin and history of the word brand? How might it resemble and differ from that of stamp, mark, identify, personify?
