(Photo by May16th XD on Unsplash)
If you’ve been hanging around this site for a while, you probably know by now that I don’t really have much of a steady topic I write on. I love to write about movies, pop culture, sports, my faith, writing, and on and on and on.
I do a pretty terrible job of staying, “On brand.”
Several years ago, I read something about how people who hope to be influential bloggers or social media users need to find their niche and ride it. They need to stay on brand.
If you’re a sports guy, talk about sports. If you’re a movie guy, talk about movies. If you’re a politics guy or a religion guy or whatever you are, stick to that. “Stay in your lane,” so to speak.
You should know that if a public figure is going into a political rant on social media and you drop a “Stick to sports,” on them, they will generally get rather irate. And that’s fair, I think, because public figures should be welcome to use their public platform to talk about whatever they want to talk about.
Now that doesn’t save them from the repercussions of what they’re saying, of course. If you stand up on a soapbox and start yelling, you have to accept that the crowd might yell back and you might not like what they have to say. But if you expect other people to listen to you, you need to be ready to listen to them.
I know that I’m not a “public figure.” I see the page view data on my posts. I realize that, on my best day, I’m only getting about 200 people to read one post. So please don’t misunderstand what I’m saying here, because I am in no way trying to puff myself up as some great “influencer.” I’m just using my site as an example of this branding concept.
My website is not great at branding. I designed a unique little logo with my name, that’s kinda fun, and it has geometric shapes in the background for some texture. I bet about 95% of you just looked up at the logo to see if you could spot the shapes in the background. And I bet almost that same 95% of you had never actually noticed those shapes before.
“Wow. I never knew that Sony Michel and George Lucas had such overlapping fan bases!” (Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash)
But that’s about the extent of the branding here. Really. I try to keep things looking neat and professional. I try to have complementary colors present and use high-quality images. But I’m not really all that interested in having uniform content.
If you were to look at my website here, and especially at the posts, you would figure that my brand is somewhere in the middle of Star Wars, Georgia football, and Mary Poppins. I know I only wrote one thing on Mary Poppins, but Emily Blunt’s smile is so infectious that it just takes over.
So much of everything we do today revolves around branding. Especially when it comes to cementing your “personal brand.” But how does "building your brand" really fit into God's plan? Is that what we are called to do? Is that who we are called to be?
True, God can use our notoriety for His glory. But should we be the ones to seek that notoriety, or should we just make ourselves available and let God use us how He sees fit?
Thats a thought I struggle with. When I was building LarryWynn.com for Dad, I worried about finding a balance between having information available, making a good website, and being braggy or showy about it. It's a little different when someone else chooses to promote you, but people wouldn't know that. They would just look at the website and see "This Guy" pumping himself up.
Then with this site. Am I just promoting myself? Am I just mentioning my faith to cover what's ultimately a selfish ambition? I don't know.
Look, I’m not covering any new ground when I sit here and say, “Our culture doesn’t promote humility!” You could probably go out there and find a thousand different think pieces about that.
Truth be told, I really don’t know what to say about branding and the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Perhaps the one consistency in my “brand” on this site has been that I always choose to write about and talk about things where I have a pretty strong confidence in my opinion. I believe that my opinion is well-informed, rather intelligent, and accurate.
When it comes to this notion of branding in the modern world and how the simple act of branding might or might not run contrary to the mission and the Gospel of Jesus Christ…I’ve got to give a hearty shoulder shrug and a resigned “Iuhno.”
On one hand, the whole notion of having a personal brand and promoting your personal brand seems to be an issue of pride. It’s the ultimate lifestyle of saying, “I am important!”
It’s especially dangerous for people in ministry. Think about “famous Christians” like Russell Moore and David Platt and Chris Tomlin. I wonder if they all have at least one person regularly talking to them about their brand. That hypothetical individual would likely be a well-meaning person, someone who is just looking out for their employer and/or friend, but that doesn’t make the idea of a brand good. And just because that voice is there, it doesn’t mean those people are listening. For the record, I have a lot of respect for those three men and others like them.
When Jesus noticed that all who had come to the dinner were trying to sit in the seats of honor near the head of the table, he gave them this advice: “When you are invited to a wedding feast, don’t sit in the seat of honor. What if someone who is more distinguished than you has also been invited? The host will come and say, ‘Give this person your seat.’ Then you will be embarrassed, and you will have to take whatever seat is left at the foot of the table!
“Instead, take the lowest place at the foot of the table. Then when your host sees you, he will come and say, ‘Friend, we have a better place for you!’ Then you will be honored in front of all the other guests. For those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”
Luke 14:7-11
Since I can’t really give you better advice than Jesus can…I guess that should be the end of it.
But it isn’t. For a few reasons.
First, I think it is fair to ask who is doing the promoting. Sure, maybe it isn’t the best to toot your own horn or make yourself out to be a big deal, but what if someone else is doing it for you? Looking back at the story Jesus tells here in Luke 14, it was ultimately the host who is supposed to honor the guest.
“So that Adam Wynn website I showed you was a bust, but I really need to show you this website my other friend made called EelSlap.com. Trust me. It is life-changing.” (Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash)
So maybe there’s a caveat here. It might not be all that great of an idea for us to go overboard on promoting ourselves, but maybe we should generously promote others we know and care about. (That means I expect all of you to share this article with all of your friends: Tweet about it, link it on Facebook, bombard your cousin with text messages, whatever it takes.)
If we admire someone’s work, if we admire someone’s ability or their message, everything that would typically be considered their “brand,” then we can promote that person and their brand for them. There is no reason we can’t do that, unless of course their brand is itself antithetical to the Gospel. Then we should probably reconsider.
At the same time, what happens if I write this piece and then do nothing with it? I don’t post a link, I don’t let people know what I’ve written, I do nothing. What happens then? I imagine it would all be in vain.
Yes, I suppose God could spontaneously cause this article to go viral with zero input from me. That is true. But it also seems like I should be willing to put some effort into the promotion of my work if I truly believe that these words are from God, right?
If I believe that my message is from God, then I have no recourse but to promote it. I would be derelict in my duties as a believer and as a writer if I just sat on my words, wouldn’t I?
That does complicate things, though, when I write an article titled, “All the Ways that Luke Skywalker Should Murder Kylo Ren.” There’s not much Gospel content in there. I could stretch it out and try to say that Luke is a portrayal of the prophet Elijah at the end of his life and…yeah. You can see through that so well that I could put that argument up on my front door and use it as a peephole.
Obviously I don’t believe that it is sinful to talk about movies or sports. I don’t think that I’m abandoning my faith if I dedicate some bandwidth to these topics, but I do feel like I need to be conscious of how much bandwidth I dedicate to secondary and tertiary things. If I truly believe that nothing in this world is more important than the Gospel of Christ, then how can I really be okay with spending so much more of my time talking about other things?
That’s why this question of brand is so difficult for me. If I’m being fully transparent, my dream in this world is to be a writer. I want to be a successful writer who tells stories and sells novels and I dream of the day that I can walk into a bookstore and see a display with my work on it. That would be a dream come true.
(Or an Amazon front page with my work, since bookstores probably won’t exist in another six months…)
And I know that I won’t get there without at least some degree of self-promotion. Without some careful maintenance of “my brand,” I likely won’t ever sniff that kind of worldly success. But then I also have to wonder if that’s even what God wants for me. If it isn’t, then I need to be willing to abandon that dream and that carefully crafted brand I’ve created for myself.
I feel like it is also worth mentioning that managing your brand could also lead to you living a false life. If you are so concerned with your personal brand that you start changing who you are, then you’re not really you. You’re living a disingenuous lifestyle.
If you want to live for Christ, then you should do your best to abolish sin. We’re in agreement there. And a cynic could say, “Isn’t self-denial also a false life?” But that’s just not the same thing. Self-improvement and self-control, in the name of Christ, are all about being more like the person you should be. Specifically, it’s about following Jesus Christ.
I would even argue that something like dieting and exercising in the name of health and fitness is not false. Look, I love eating carbs and then not running 50 miles, but that doesn’t mean I’m all of a sudden lying to myself if I start taking more interest in my health. That just means I’m learning to grow. And not grow outward.
“Okay, maybe EelSlap.com didn’t do it for you, but I really think you’ll like…”
”Let me stop you right there. You should know that you have weird friends.” (Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash)
But there is a fine line between the natural progression of change and growth and the falsehood of “brand management.” And things that are sometimes good can be sometimes bad when done for the wrong reasons.
I don’t think the health metaphor fits all that well with avoiding sin and temptation, to be fair. Someone could adopt a health-nut lifestyle just for their brand, and it could lead to falsehood. If you are really avoiding sin, that isn’t false. What can make that false is when you publicly lambast others for not avoiding sin like you are, and then in the back closet you engage in all the sin you want. That’s false.
You see now why I call this a question I can’t answer. The idea of branding is complicated and hard. And I don’t have any idea how you should answer these questions in your own life. I wish I did, because then I might have a better chance of answering them in mine.
For now, I think we can adopt a few general rules that will helps us determine whether or not our own attempts at branding and self-promotion are in our best interest and in the best interest of the Gospel:
Don’t do things just so other people will see you.
Don’t do things that you shouldn’t do just for attention.
Don’t do things that harm your testimony and your integrity.
Outside of that, I feel like there is a lot of grey area. Sort of like the gray area on using British spellings of words in American English. But that’s a horse of another colour.
In the vein of this piece, I want to spend a few weeks talking about similar “Questions That I Can’t Answer.” Be on the lookout for the next one real soon, and help me avoid prideful self-promotion by promoting this piece and this website!