There's a concept in brand marketing that you have to be consistent.
For example, if McDonald's changed the colors of their brand from red and yellow to purple and black, people would be confused. They probably wouldn't recognize the new branding as McDonald's.
The market needs to get a clear, consistent message from your brand: this is who we are and this is what we do.
However, it’s difficult to apply this marketing rule to individual people.
People change
Human beings are not consistent. We’re dynamic. We change.
We have experiences as we go through life.
Our interests change. Our passions change. Our beliefs change.
If you operate in the business world with your personal name as your brand name, it can become problematic if you want to change what you do.
For example, if Jane Doe has been a gaming influencer for 10 years and then all of a sudden she starts talking about baking, her audience will be confused.
They probably won't stick around. They followed her because she made content about gaming, not because she made content about baking.
This is not to say that Jane can’t grow a new audience of people who are interested in baking. But the problem is that she was using her own personal name as her brand name.
So the market got the idea: this is Jane Doe and she talks about gaming.
In order to grow the new audience for her baking content, Jane may want to choose an entirely new brand name that doesn’t mention her personal name.
To avoid this problem from the beginning, you can create separate brand names for each of the various topic areas that you operate in.
Example
For example, let’s say you’re a writer. There are several different topics that you write about regularly. However, someone who is interested in topic A might not care about topic B.
This is actually a problem that I’m facing myself.
I’ve been writing this newsletter since September 2021.
For the first few months, I wrote short prose, poetry, book reviews, and personal journal entries.
In January 2022, I started writing longer essays, writing advice, and commentary on work.
Then I wrote about travel, entrepreneurship, mental health, emotional health, and art.
You get the idea.
I’m all over the place.
But I’m okay with that.
At the same time, I understand the marketing problem—the need to be consistent for the sake of the reader.
If I subscribe to a publication about investing, I expect them to write about investing. If they start writing about something else that I’m not interested in, I’ll probably unsubscribe.
So, how can you achieve both writing about what you want to write about, regardless of whether the new content fits the theme of your previous content, and giving the reader a consistent experience?
My current solution is to have a place where I can publish everything (for me, it’s this newsletter), as well as separate brands that stay on topic.
The place where you publish everything is the ocean that feeds the streams (the separate brands).
People can still follow the place where you publish everything, but these will likely be your close friends and family, people who know you personally. They can tolerate you going all over the place because they’re not following you to get value from the content you’re publishing about a specific topic. They’re following you.
The people who want to get value from content about a specific topic can follow one of your separate brands.
I’ve written more here about how I’m creating a portfolio of content brands.
Conclusion
If you’re in the process of starting something—e.g., a business, a newsletter, a YouTube channel—think twice before you make your personal name the brand name.
Instead, give it a name that represents the topic.
For example, if you’ll be talking about baking, then you might choose a name like “Baking for Beginners.”
Then, six months from now, if you want to start talking about something different, you can create a new, separate brand with a name that aligns with the new topic. And you’ll avoid confusing the followers of your baking brand.
This is especially important as more and more people are becoming online content creators. You can publish content about your various interests under various brands, rather than feeling pigeonholed into one brand because it has your personal name on it.