I will confess I’ve had my own run-ins with self branding, beginning at the early age of six, when I was christened. Why my parents had waited for this rite I never discovered. But wait they did, and I found my six-year-old self, one Sunday, dressed in an uncomfortable dress shirt, coat and tie in the sanctuary of Berkeley, California’s Northbrae Community Church, a child in the midst of a batch of parents with infants, ready to have my name officially sanctioned with a water drip. At home, as my father was tying my necktie, he told me “if you don’t like the name you have, now’s the time to change it.” Up until that time, the thought of changing my name had never occurred to me. Of course I’d thought I was probably adopted, that my real parents were somewhere, waiting to claim me. But the possibility of changing my name hadn’t really occurred. I did have a nickname, dropped on me by my father.
In the Dark Ages, before the internet, before instant communications and social media, branding was first a Western thing (a hot iron stamp applied to a cow’s flank), then, of course, it was an important part of advertising (Chiquita bananas weren’t really a thing until Madison Avenue made them a thing). And now there’s lot of talk about personal branding, which seems to have become a thing right after we all started wearing t-shirts with product names. By now the Kardashians and others have taught us the importance of personal branding and how to do it. And now that Big Sports is involved (Cleveland, Washington), it sets the mind a-thinking.
When I was born there was a very popular comic strip called “Gasoline Alley,” in which the characters aged from year to year. There had just been a baby born in that comic strip family; he was called Corky. My father decided to use that nickname for me. So it was a name I answered to. Along with my mother’s “Robert.” I thought of telling the minister I wanted my name changed. But all the babies were getting regular names, and I didn’t want to confuse the minister. So “Robert” I was, “Robert” I was christened, and “Robert” I stayed. For a while. It was a comfortable name; Robert was what called me to dinner, got me up in the morning, what my teachers called me. And my aunts and uncles and grandparents (except for one grandmother who called me “Robbie.”). It was, for me, a safe name. Comfortable.
When I was 11 years old, circumstance took me to boarding school where I decided to change my name. Perhaps because, without anyone telling me, I knew my parents were divorcing and I thought a name change might help keep my father in the family, I decided I would now be known as “Corky.” When the dorm-master asked my name, I told him: “Corky.” A nice way to ease into things I thought. But that night at dinner the Head of School called for silence, the entire school stopped talking, and into the silence, in loud, stentorian tones the Head of School boomed out: “The new boy wishes to be called “Corky.” Red face, red ears, holding back tears. But it was done. And for a year I was Corky. A spunky American kid with a bright smile. Who cared? It was thousands of miles away from my real home, in California. (BTW, it did nothing to alter the path to the divorce.)
When I returned to the States and began high school, there was definitely no Corky around, and equally definitely no Robert. Robert was too stand-off-ish, too formal. I needed a name that was more approachable. How about … Bob? Yes, Bob. Even though the aunts and uncles and cousins and all but one grandparent called me Robert, to the outside world I was Bob … a simple, easy, uncomplicated guy, a sidekick, the Second Best Friend. Which lasted until my first job in financial services, at which point I retired “Bob” and became Robert across my entire existence: Robert at home, Robert with his cousins, and Robert at work.
And now? I’m pretty much at the point of “Just don’t call me late for lunch.”