My husband and I have a joke that if I every destroy my online credibility and I need to hide out I can always use my married name. Combine my married last name and a different first name and I could easily disappear.
I have no desire to do this, my name, such as it is, still has value to me. But what if you were a nationally recognized brand and you had to suddenly pivot and alter your name. That was the most interesting part of Unlabel, designer/artist Mark Ecko's book which came out last year but I didn't read until last night on a late night plane ride home from a real estate technology conference. It was the news that he had listed his massive home for sale that brought me back to the book in the depths of my Kindle app.
The book is more biography than business book (although there are some business lessons tacked on) and the most intriguing part is that at one point, just as his business was truly taking off he had to change from Echo to Ecko. He'd spent years building credibility under one name and then just like that, it was over.
The business survived, although the recession and Marc's over-ambitious spending definite took their toll, and it turned out the name change was absorbed and the business continued.
There's a lot of talk in the social space about "personal branding" but your brand is more than your name. For Ecko it was both the physical imprint of his rhino logo and the larger sense of his brand as artistic and hip that helped him survive the name change. In some ways the name change was liberating, it helped him try other names (some that failed, some that succeeded).
Your brand and your value isn't your logo, it isn't your social media presence, and it isn't your name. Your name matters, your logo matters, but what truly is most important is something far less tangible, it's what you bring to the world. The logo and name are simply a shorthand for conveying this. The logo, the name, your Twitter following, are not what you are selling. What you are selling is your products, your content, your services and yourself in terms of what you bring to the table.
For Ecko the thread that ran through all of his efforts was his creativity and his art and yet, what he's perhaps most infamous for his buying a $750,000 baseball, having a basketball court in his office, and yes, his crazy taste in real estate. I'm not sure any of that was good PR or not (I tend to think no and it certainly wasn't always in concert with his brand identity) but what it did have was a certain sort of wacky authenticity. Maybe that's the real lesson here. Your brand can survive without your name, without your logo, what could doom it is if you stray from your authentic self.
Stay true.