Anti-brand activism makes personal-brand defense self-contradictory

Evidence

If my brand had indeed been diluted, it stood to reason that I should immediately endeavor to become a better, more distinctive brand, while aggressively defending its edges against all would-be infringers. There was, however, one glaring problem with this plan. I have a deeply conflicted relationship with this whole idea of humans behaving like corporate brands. My first book, No Logo, was a treatise against the rise of lifestyle branding, including the idea that individual people should shape and market themselves as commodities. Me treating Wolf like a branding problem would be about as off-brand as I could get. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 154

Categorization

• XREF: The irony is structurally identical to the Mirror World thesis — the left abandoned the language of brand critique, and Klein finds it has been colonized by the very hustle culture she critiqued in No Logo. Echoes of the book’s larger argument. — connects to: One can defend a public image with no authentic self behind it — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 403; Self-branding’s core contradiction is demanding authenticity for a market audience. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 420; Branding analysis of terrorism as sympathy enforces a period of demanded non-thinking — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1431
• QUESTION: The pun ‘as off-brand as I could get’ — Klein flagging her own method’s reliance on wordplay. Worth asking whether the punning device (Doppelganger as serious concept vs. pun) holds analytically or collapses into the very branding language it mocks.