Every artist, designer, writer, marketer, and small business owner will tell you that promoting themselves is the most challenging task they will ever undertake. There is just something incredibly terrifying about labeling yourself for the world.
“But that’s not all I am,” your creative mind thinks while trying to distill your life’s work into five sentences, or design a website that is an undeniable reflection of your inner self.
I’m struggling with the idea of labels presently because frankly, I fear being known for just one thing.
The truth, however, is that we must create labels in order to market ourselves effectively. If you don’t label yourself, others will create a label for you. It’s just how our minds work: we like to organize things into defined areas. Defining who we are is like giving people a hook for their minds to hang your hat on. If you don’t provide the hook, they’ll hang up your hat for you anyway—and you might not like where they put it.
As much as I have feared the idea of labels over the past few years, here is what I am discovering: labeling doesn’t mean narrowing.
Think about Ronald Reagan, the Hollywood actor turned United States President, or more recently, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the actor turned California Governor. Then there’s Bill Gates, who has shifted his focus from Microsoft to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Oprah Winfrey, who started her career as a talk show host and is now influencing social change throughout the world. These people were not afraid to embrace their labels, nor did their labels confine them.
Fear of labels is a fear of acceptance more than a fear of definition. We are afraid that others will not accept our labels, so rather than define ourselves, we quietly allow others to define who we are. This is not the road to marketing success, and it is certainly not the path to happiness.
Labels are simply a starting point for people to share a collective understanding about you. Without that collective understanding, you will mean many things to many people, and that is a recipe for marketing failure.
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