A miserable little pile of secrets.

september 2nd, 2013.

I have a friend who says that marketing is one of the most worthy challenges in the current era of fractured platforms (platforms calving from platforms like icebergs). Another friend says that the word “marketing” is unfairly maligned.

I think marketing is bad! It makes me mad! And sad.

Every once in a while I'll hear someone say: “personal brand.” Like during a TED talk or something. Or on like Merlin Mann's Twitter. It makes me ill. I'm complex and various as fuck, and so is everyone I know. The watermark for my personal brand is my entire life. Those new to the party have thirty years of catching up to do.

“But don't you see, that iconoclastic/shitty attitude IS your personal brand!” oh no, oh no you don't. So tricksy are the ways of marketing.

Theoretically I had a five-year career in nonprofit marketing, but I didn't do any branding or messaging or anything like that except when they forced me to. Mostly I coded the most tight and beautiful HTML that I could and managed some print projects.

Today those skills are the basis for my freelance web design work, including the lucrative corporate gig I had last month coding spam emails (marketing). In the office kitchen there's some handsoap that brands itself as “Wowerful.”

Across time and space, in another office, I hear the laughter of the human who came up with “Wowerful.” Insisting on making pun right to the soap's face, to the company's face, to all of our faces.

“I love my job!” she says.