Your brand is your identity, your reputation and what you are known for. And, really, we all have one. In the near future, I’m going to speak to place brands and my complicated relationship with that idea and how it fits into my work today. But on the personal side, I have also had a journey with my own brand.
I am my own brand. In my work I have occasionally felt self-serving and squeamish about making and living by that statement but, it is true, like it or not. Brands, whether they are about you, your business, your place, or even a product, have to be authentic to stick. They have to be true, organic, and developed over time.
A few years into my practice, I started thinking about my professional brand. And I realized pretty quickly that a hallmark of my brand is relatability. It became part of my brand as I told stories about my own place journey, both in my talks and in my book. I am never shy about using myself as my best example.
In fact, the Call Me Katherine portion of The City Doctor Journal you are currently reading is a result of what people have come to expect from me: the personal side. And though, again, I occasionally feel self-serving at times and wonder if people really want to know the personal side, the popularity of this aspect of the Journal tells me you do.
I really like the fact that people describe me as a “personable scientist” or that I help people “learn without ever feeling like they are being taught”. Yep, I read the feedback given about my talks and that feedback has informed my professional brand, as it should.
But it really does reflect my unique approach to my work. So I embrace it because I know how I get that reputation. After all, I am not a typical urbanist, planner, or even placemaker. I am a social work-trained researcher and practitioner who has applied this discipline in a new framework of place to make my contribution on these issues by definition be more humanistic, systems-oriented and…well…relatable to everyday people. The mainstream is my target audience because I truly feel if folks outside of a placemaking echo chamber don’t get this aspect of their life right, they won’t live their best life. That is not an Oprah-ism. It’s a scientific fact restated for better public consumption. And that’s what I do. My brand.
Being true to my brand and emerging in the field this way has not always been easy for me. I didn’t do what I was “supposed to” with my social work degrees and, believe me, I’ve gotten some grief and exclusion from those in that discipline as a result. By trying to mainstream my work, bloggers may say I’m “making light” of the work or question the validity of placemaking itself. Fine. I guess every brand has its challenges.
The theater work, the DIY projects, stories about Grace, and other personal things I share are really just who I am everyday. I bring it into my work life because there is a lesson or place application I have gained as I went through those experiences and I want to share to make it real for others. Just because I am an expert in this stuff doesn’t mean I am immune from the place journey experience, warts and all. I really am my best example sometimes.
So to stay true to my brand, I have had to put blinders on occasionally so I’m not tempted to brand drift to accommodate all the chatter at the expense of, well, me. I won’t change how I do what I do to try to please everybody, because that’s a fool’s errand that robs you of too much. That’s what I tell myself, and places, when we are both tempted. And we all are.
Luckily and importantly for me, I know through the overwhelmingly positive feedback I receive, my unique approach to this work that has become central to my brand has allowed me to more effectively move people and places down a better path. If you look at the testimonials on my webpage, you can see that it is often my delivery that is cited for that progress and effectiveness. And that’s good enough for me.