Multiplicity as a Personal Brand Strategy

If you're like me or any modern professional with a mild identity crisis and access to Wi-Fi, you will eventually be exposed to the same modern anti-corporate propaganda within 7 mins of doomscrolling:

• That 9-5 is a prison,

• Your job is renting out your soul in installments

• You need more social media presence.

• Visibility is leverage. 

• Your POV is your moat.

• BUILD A PERSONAL BRAND.

So, naturally, I did what everyone tells you to do. I try to build a personal brand.

And the first step: think about my niche.

I tried to think about my niche. My format. My plan. My hook. My content pillars. My repeatable point of view.

But something did not sit right.

The Problem Was Never the Niche

For a while, I thought I was resistant to having a niche. It felt majorly icky, because it feels like I am being asked to become less dimensional so I could become more legible. 

When I was freelancing, I did everything. Performance marketing. Content. Design. Demand generation. Campaigns. Brand thinking. Copy. Strategy. Whatever needed to be figured out, I would find a way to figure it out.

But the internet gurus in linen clothes selling a course would tell you that being able to be recognised by one focus is the key to a comfortable life with financial freedom! 

And sure, there’s power in that. 

It would be soooo amazing if everytime someone thought of “focaccia bread”, they immediately thought of you because you completed a 30-day content challenge on different focaccia flavours.

But what if you’re also really good at baking cakes! Or tarts? Or what if you identify as a pastry chef?!

You see what I mean?

Breadbaking is a category. 

Pastry chefs are a world!

Clarity Is Not the Same as Reduction

It isn't hard to understand why the advice of "niching down" exists. The internet rewards simple labels, and markets remember sharp edges.

• It is easier to sell one thing.

• It is easier to explain one thing.

• It is easier to package one thing.

• It is easier for the market to remember one thing.

But I kept feeling like I was being asked to build a smaller version of myself. But….

The Best Brands Are Not Flat

They are layered.

Aesop is not just skincare.

It is ritual. Restraint. Taste. Architecture. Language. A very specific kind of bathroom-counter intelligence. You do not just buy the hand wash. You buy the feeling that your life could be more considered if only your sink area had better typography.

R.F. Kuang is not just dark academia and empire.

There is ambition. Theft. authorship. language. violence. complicity. It is about hunger, performance, proximity to power, and the grotesque little theatre of wanting to be seen as brilliant.

Eileen Gu is more than just a skier.

She is athleticism, beauty, intellect, fashion, global identity, ambition, and the strangely modern ability to become a projection screen for everyone else’s ideas about excellence.

None of these people or brands are compelling because they are simple and one-dimensional. They are compelling because they are coherent.

Simple says: one thing.

Coherent says: many things, held together by a recognisable intelligence.

That is what I am interested in. That is what human are interested in. 

Not becoming easier to categorise. But becoming harder to misunderstand.

I Know How to Position Brands. Why Is It So Hard to Position Myself?

Here is the slightly humiliating confession: I have been trying to start this blog for three years.

Can you imagine?

Three years. And it wasn't because I had nothing to say (haha, that would almost be easier). I had too much to say.

I wanted to write about marketing. But also design. But also taste. But also AI. But also how people build careers. But also how brands become desirable. And every time I tried to begin, I could hear the advice in my head.

• What is your niche?

• Who is this for?

• What is the takeaway?

• What is the point?

A very rude set of questions, made worse by the fact that they are also correct.

When you are working on someone else’s brand, these questions are useful. Necessary, even. But when you are working on yourself, they become existential. *cues the soundtrack!*

• What is my niche?

• Who am I for?

• What do I want to be known for?

• What is the point of me?

Suddenly, this is therapy wearing a blazer. And perhaps that is why it is so difficult. When you position a brand, the product does not talk back. When you position yourself, every strategic cut feels personal.

And I always come to the same conclusion…

Multifaceted Is Not Messy

We assume someone with many interests is somehow less serious than someone who has chosen one very narrow thing and built a tiny digital kingdom around it. We assume range is a lack of discipline.

But range was never the enemy of clarity.

Lack of perspective is.

Being multifaceted is not messy if there is a worldview underneath it. A person can talk about many things and still feel coherent when the same pattern keeps appearing.

• The same taste.

• The same tension.

• The same questions.

• The same way of noticing.

• The same refusal.

• The same obsession.

For me, the pattern is becoming clearer.

I am interested in how people, brands, and businesses become more legible, desirable, and trusted without becoming less human. I am interested in the emotional architecture behind commercial decisions. I am interested in taste as a strategy. I am interested in marketing that does not treat people like funnels with shoes. I am interested in how AI is forcing us to reconsider originality, expertise, labour, and the value of having a point of view. I am interested in why some brands feel alive and others feel like someone filled out a template correctly and called it a personality.

That is not one topic.

But it is one way of seeing.

Dimension Is the Strategy

The goal is not to niche down until I become one clean internet category.

The goal is to become coherent enough that my range becomes recognisable.

I do not want to file down every strange edge until I become easy to explain at a networking event. I want to build a body of work with dimension.

To Be Dimensional Is to Refuse the Cheapest Version of Clarity

I still believe in clarity though. Deeply. But I am becoming suspicious of the cheapest version of it that is constantly telling us to say less, be simpler, or choosing one thing to make yourself easier to sell. 

So before you rush to define your niche, maybe ask a better question. What are the themes that keep finding their way back to you? What do you notice that other people miss? What tension are you always trying to resolve? What kind of work could only come from your particular mix of experience, taste, instinct, and obsession?

That might be where the real strategy begins.