Are you concerned about your personal brand? Your company brand? Your organization’s brand? Why are you concerned? Can you think of one good reason why you ought to be concerned? Great! Now, look at that one good reason. Is it really a good reason to be concerned about your branding, your own or someone else’s?

I submit to you that none of us ought to be really concerned about branding. I know that draws the ire of brand strategists and branding experts, and I maintain that not being concerned about branding is the way to go. Congruency, consistency between who we say we are and who we actually are is the key. Let me give you an example.

I accompanied a friend of mine on one of his jobs cleaning a restaurant kitchen. This happened to be a seafood restaurant of some standing in the city, and we started the job at about 2200 hrs. Now, besides the usual several tons of dirt, soot, grime and other yuck you don’t want to know about, I observed something pretty interesting. The restaurant kitchen had a large dishwasher, and the crockery that came out of it was sparkling clean, no issues with that. However, all that sparkling clean crockery was stored, intentionally or otherwise, beneath the tanks containing the live fish, lobsters, prawns, shellfish and other living creatures. I noticed that whenever the occasional but inevitable splash came, some water would get splashed onto the – you guessed it, the sparkling clean crockery stored in pristine neatness below the tanks. I won’t tell you the restaurant name, but you can be sure I haven’t had a meal there yet!

Still concerned about your brand? How are you resolving that issue? Think about “Living your dreams.” Well, how about “Living your brand?” Isn’t being unconscious about your brand the superior way to go?