Brand Identity: Struggling to Maintain my Identity While Trying to Build It

I don’t care what anyone tells you, marketing is difficult. Personal promotion is no different. There are a plethora of videos and articles, and support groups that will tell you marketing is as easy as carefully designed posts and frequent and regular engagement, but no one ever talks about how hard it is to create an identity and not forget who you really are.

Branding is all about establishing who you are, what you are about, and what you are trying to sell. It sounds pretty simple, but when you get down to the nitty-gritty it can get a little personal. Sitting down and trying to figure out what kind of person you are, forces you to think about who you really are. Who am I? What do I stand for, and what do I have to offer?

Barring a potential existential identity crisis, once you manage to get past the details of what makes, you, your next task is to figure out how to show your potential fans who you are. You’ll suddenly find yourself spending hours of research on finding the perfect keywords to describe yourself. Sure I’m a country singer, but country singers are literally everywhere these days. What sets me apart? Atlanta Country Singer? Is my music more honky-tonk, Nashville, or outlaw country? What colors best reflect my message. Am I a blue or a yellow person? Would black be an accurate accent to my personality?

Hours, days, weeks, months pass and I have a hefty collection of trendy hashtags and keywords to describe myself and my music. I’m swamped with color swatches to represent my varying projects, and my collection of social posts read like a timeline of my marketing journey. Each image is carefully weighed and measured by engagement and analytical metrics and I find myself asking, is this all that I am?
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 Of course, the answer is no, but do my followers know this? How can I accurately portray myself without losing myself in the process? The quest for the perfect balance continues.
 

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