Brands learned to talk like people.
People learned to operate like brands.
Now everybody is posting from the same rectangle.
A 23-year-old guy has a logo, content calendar, audience strategy, visual identity, merch, affiliate links, a newsletter, three monetization funnels, and a launch date.
Meanwhile a billion-dollar company is posting “bro 😭” under a meme.
Great.
We have arrived somewhere very normal.
The old distinction was simple enough. A person was a person. A brand was a company identity built on top of a product.
Online, that split barely holds.
A creator can be the product, the distribution channel, the customer support desk, the media company, and the mascot at the same time.
An anonymous account can become valuable without anybody knowing who runs it.
A meme page can sell something.
A founder account can have a bigger audience than the company.
A company account can develop a personality people recognize separately from the actual company.
Once attention has value, almost any identity can start behaving like a brand.
That does not mean every person should become one.
I actually think forcing “personal brand” logic onto normal human posting is responsible for a lot of the dead-feeling internet. People start editing every thought based on whether it fits their niche.
But pretending the brand layer does not exist is also silly.
Your username, profile picture, tone, recurring topics, screenshots, who you reply to, what you never talk about, all of it accumulates.
Eventually people form a model of you.
That model exists whether you designed it or not.
Maybe “brand” is just the annoying business word for that model.
Still hate the phrase personal brand, though.
It sounds like deodorant.