The lawyer who commutes LENS every morning- He’s pretending. The businessman who carries a briefcase- He was laid off. The construction worker wearing a tool belt- He’s out of work.
In a world obsessed with labels and where everyone is quick to judge, keeping up appearances and projecting a certain image may mean the most important brand of all may be ourselves.
Branding experts use slogans like“Find your unique qualities and highlight Brand You!”Or,“You’re not a worker, you’re not a job title! You’re a brand!”wrote Alina Tugend in The Times.“We have to create our own job security, and branding is part of that.”
Faking it or not, that lawyer, businessman and construction worker are managing others’impressions of who they are.“To the extent that it sustains good habits and reflects personal pride,”psychologists say,“this kind of play-acting can be an extremely effective social strategy, especially in uncertain times,”wrote The Times’s Benedict Carey.
Psychologists say projecting pride can help people thrive in difficult social circumstances, he wrote. In one experiment, Jessica L.Tracey of the University of British Columbia found that people tend to associate an expression of pride with high status - even when they know that the person wearing it is low on the ladder, wrote Mr.Carey.
“So long as you’re a decent actor, and people don’t know too much about your situation, all systems are go,”Lisa A.Williams, a doctoral candidate in psychology at Northeastern University in Boston, told Mr.Carey.
Being a decent actor or master craftsman of an image is important in a society with a penchant to judge. First impressions about people are crucial to the way we function, social scientists say - even when those judgments are wrong, wrote The Times’s Pam Belluck.
“Stereotypes are seen as a necessary mechanism for making sense of information,”David Amodio, an assistant professor of psychology at New York University told Ms.Belluck.“If we look at a chair, we can categorize it quickly even though there are many different kinds of chairs out there.”
Standing out from the rest is essential when creating an image, especially when job hunting. Joining sites like LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter is a way to brand yourself, wrote Ms.Tugend.“If you don’t brand yourself, Google will brand you,”said Sherry Beck Paprocki, co-author of the book “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Branding Yourself.”
It’s important to control what information comes up when your name is searched online. And not being online today is akin to not existing, wrote Ms.Tugend. We sell ourselves by displaying what we do, write, eat, listen to and read.
Well, maybe not“read”so much. Because of the Kindle, an electronic book reader, the practice of judging people by their books may disappear, wrote Joanne Kaufman in The Times. If people stop buying books, it’s going to be hard to form opinions about them by looking at their bookshelves.
Seeing which books someone has is “the faux-intellectual version of sniffing through someone’s medicine cabi-net,” Ammon Shea, who wrote about his year spent reading the Oxford English Dictionary, told Ms.Kaufman.
Well, people can go to a Web site like Goodreads and let everyone know what they are reading (or pretending to). Because it is no longer about keeping the medicine cabinet closed, but rather opening it up and carefully honing its contents for everyone to see.
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