This week's Commonplace is about the weird gap between reputation and personal brand.
Reputations have existed since forever. But personal brand is a newer phenomenon — made possible only by social media.
What's the overlap? And what's the diff?
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One of the more interesting sources for this week's post is Leonard Lauder's autobiography, The Company I Keep. It's brilliant.
Lauder turned Estée into a brand. As in, his MOTHER, not the company. Not at first.
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Later, he would take Estée's projection, and apply it to Karen Graham, the first 'face of Estée Lauder'. esteelauder.com/estee-stories-
Graham was the first model ever to have a beauty contract; Lauder single-handedly created the idea of beauty sponsorships.
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(Actually, there are a LOT of firsts peppered through the book. I was surprised to learn that his mother pioneered the use of free samples, and that Clinique popularised the 3 step process of 'cleanse, exfoliate, moisturise'.)
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Perhaps Lauder's greatest contribution to branding strategy was his notion of building a brand collection, which he got from his time at the Navy.
For good reason: Estée Lauder became known as 'my mother's brand'. Instead of fighting it, he launched Clinique.
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Anyway, to bring this back to the topic of 'reputation vs personal brand' — from 1958 to the late 60s, Estée may have well had a personal brand (and WAS the company's brand), but her reputation was a different thing.
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Her reputation was that of a good business partner, one who would help stores sell more product. She introduced Leonard to the families that owned the major luxury stores. In the 70s, Lauder had to extricate himself from those relationships. It was difficult.
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Why did he have to change? Because the retail landscape was changing beneath their feet.
I'm willing to bet that those strained relationships were a lot trickier to navigate than Lauder writes about here.
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Anyway, I'm enthralled by the whole Estée Lauder story, because it's essentially a history of branding from first principles.
I still marvel at the intuitive way Leonard created Estée's personal brand, and then shifted the company away from it.
It's a great book. Go read it.
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