Man… you know you’re tired when you catch a glimpse of an advert that features a graphic of a hair follicle and you think it’s a vagina.
It also says a lot about advertising when you weren’t surprised in the slightest that you think you’re watching an advert on early evening TV for something to do with a vagina. What they might be wanting to sell you on the vaginal front is a mystery but it’s 2019 and the world will try and sell you anything if it thinks it can make some kind of margin on it.
In only a kind of related subject, earlier today I was running some admin on the site here and one of the links took me to an article on personal branding… and I read it out of curiosity. Then I read some more articles on it. It’s a real world thing that people are concerned about. If you don’t have a ‘personal brand’, how do people know what you do? If they don’t know what you do, how are they ever going to invest their time and money in you?
It’s a good question and an important one, whatever business you’re in but there’s a part of me that simply reacts with: ‘this person is trying to sell me a personal brand message’ and I don’t much like being treated like an idiot… and I switch off because I like to discover things for myself.
Whatever happened to discovery? Led Zeppelin were a mysterious band because they never talked about anything. Kiss were mysterious because they didn’t have any human faces. Alice Cooper was mysterious because well… he was just mysterious.
Mysterious = people want to know more. The less they can get to know, the more interested they are in you and what you have to offer.
Much like the vagina really - though it’s probably also fair to say the opposite is true regarding the penis if your interest lies on the other side of the sex fence - it would be a worrying state of affairs if you mistook a hair follicle for a penis though.
What is it with people and hair follicles these days? Humanity has gone through millennia of coping without being stripped to the bone of its hair but now, you’re an ugly beast of a creature if you keep your hair anywhere but your head? I can’t believe people buy into it but they do. Beards are in? Seventies porno bushes are out?
Talking of keeping your hair on your head, I was thinking about cutting all of mine off again just to drive a stake through my own personal brand.
Like Kiss, the make-up over-rode the great songs. Like Alice, the chicken thing drew away from the fact that he was probably the greatest lyricist of the seventies. Like Zeppelin, the black magic drew away from the playing… then again, they all survived because they meant what they did and did it for long enough that people knew they weren’t lying.
What did I learn today?
Keep the hair.
Keep writing.
Don’t worry about ‘personal branding’, if you’re real, why would you need to brand anything at all?
If people don’t know who you are… why not?
Vaginas do not look like hair follicles.
Probably best I get some sleep before writing anything else.