After many months of research and marketplace observation, I decided to create a new brand image under the fictional persona named The Brand Guru. The identity would be presented more like a software App product and would appeal to anyone who wanted to do their own branding. As a certified trainer and 25 years of brand consultancy, I wanted to build my own online courses. In the past I had been a consultant working with a targeted network of clients in the B2B area who were mostly marketers, however, after teaching undergrad Uni students I decided I wanted to give back to the business world. I wanted to empower business owners to learn processes that I had adopted and do their own branding and marketing. To achieve this I needed to create a more consumer-friendly brand, not a corporate business mentor. I needed to invent an Avator character to overcome the seriousness of brand strategy. Ensuring I was remaining credible and knowledgeable was the key ingredient to my online success and therefore I needed to continue to manage both identities.
Getting over the Imposter Syndrome
Creating authenticity as a Guru – a course creator and mentor, throughout all of my online dialogue was a challenge as there were so many competitors and imposters in the marketplace. What set me apart? What was my unique value proposition? Drawing on my characteristics, I set about defining as many attributes which were uniquely me across both the Consultant and the Guru. Being honest, passionate and transparent about branding in all of my online forums (YouTube, LinkedIn, Podcasts) gave me agency and authority. I had been doing this across so many sectors and businesses for over 25 years. It’s the one thing I could talk about endlessly or as Jeff Pooley (2011) noted “The best way to sell yourself is to not appear to be selling yourself.”
My previous online engagement experience mainly was done through my LinkedIn profile under my name as a brand strategist consultant and I had built a steady following (almost 500). I didn’t want to create a Brand Guru LinkedIn profile, instead, I would create an Instagram and TikTok identity. I felt these channels were consumer friendly and would keep my brand tone and style approachable. Choosing more fun, accessible platforms also opened opportunities to continue to package both my old identity (consultant) with my new branded persona (Guru), which according to William Deresiewicz (2011), “The self today is an entrepreneurial self, a self that’s packaged to be sold”.
The Plumber to the Marketing Director – who was I talking to?
According to Smith and Watson (2008), our online identities are constantly interchangeable and adaptable to whatever the content creator chooses. This may be the case when I had to consider the audience I was talking to online. Having two identities with different audiences influenced the way I branded myself. For example, my consultancy identity had a specific tone and language for my followers who understood branding, they could be a Marketing Director. While my Brand Guru identity needed to be able to talk to a Plumbing small business owner who wouldn’t have any branding background and therefore my online dialogue needed to be more accessible. The challenge for me was who was my audience profile. Would it change depending on the Social Media channel I was using or was it only based on the identity I was using? This would be difficult to control in a world of content re-creation. According to Boyd and Marwick (2010) Social Media had flattened multiple audiences and this was known as the ‘context collapse phenomenon. So who and what was my audience?
Was it possible to be everything to everyone in the online world?
Multiple identities through different digital channels are possible and sometimes critical when you need to appear to be a certain way. However, did this bring about the question of how authentic I would appear if I had interchangeable identities? Or could I strategically design and curate how I ‘wanted’ to appear online, as Jeff Pooley (2011) observes “authenticity today is more accurately described as ‘calculated authenticity’?”. In today’s digital world there was no such thing as controlling the narrative. I had to ensure that although my identities were completely different (tone, name, style) they possessed the same knowledge and expertise while maintaining my true self and attributes. It still felt conflicting to be the same person under two different identities.
After much soul-searching and reflection, I chose to keep both of my online identities. I saw the potential of how one could complement the other. I also liked the idea of being a Guru avatar who could show people the enlightened path of brand wisdom, while still maintaining my old seriously professional self as Liz Mercoglaino, the Brand Consultant always up for an intellectual debate in an online forum.
References
Boyd, D & Marwick, A 2011, ‘I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience’, New Media & Society, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 114-33.
Deresiewicz, William. 2011. “Generation Sell.” New York Times Magazine, November 12.
Smith, S and Watson, J 2014, ‘Virtually Me: A Toolbox about Online Self-Presentation’, p75
Pooley, Jeff. 2011. “Authentic? Get Real.” Quoted in the New York Times, Sunday Style Section, September 11, 1–2.
Media
Infographic designed in Canva – https://www.canva.com/
Banner image – Free Pic from WordPress Media library Free images (beautiful-woman-hair-2405131-e1670628813925.jpg)
Liz Mercogliano Profile Imgae – LinkedIn. Brand Guru logo – Created by Marco Mercogliano
Research references
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnjeR-bsRM4 – WordPress Elementor
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