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Comment by brianberns | Hacker News Reader

Products (and cattle) are branded. People are not. It's demeaning to imply that a person's reputation is the same as a brand.

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I do believe there is a difference there, however. A brand is what people perceive of you before they know anything about your reputation. What do they see around the web? What image do you put off when you walk in the room? How do you treat people? What do your correspondence cards look like? How do you communicate? Those are all elements of a brand.

A reputation is all about what other people have to say and how you are preceded by what those people say. That includes things like LinkedIn recommendations, hearsay, references, etc.

Thoughts? What other terms would you use to describe the two different aspects? I do think it's important to distinguish.

I can definitely appreciate the bullshit detectors. I'll have to keep that in mind in the future, for sure. It's hard in a field like career advice not to sound woo woo from time to time. It's easy to get lost in the industry and forget how it gets interpreted by the people you're actually trying to help.

Thanks for having the patience to call that out to me.

Back in the days when "branding" applied only to cattle, the word for what you're referring to as a "personal brand" was "your name".

As in: making a name for yourself, upholding your name, being a name in good standing.

I'll leave branding to cattle, thank you muchly.

I see the distinction you are making, but I would use the word "impression" instead of "brand". E.g. The kind of impression you make on other people.

Hackers tend to have very sensitive bullshit detectors. Anything that seems phony (like the word "brand") is going to raise suspicion that you don't understand us.

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