You’ve Changed. Has Your Brand?

Pamela Anderson 2024 Headshot by Norman Wong

A picture that arrives before the person

Say the name Pamela Anderson and notice what happens. A picture shows up before anything else does: the red swimsuit, the hair, a slow-motion run down a beach. For most of us that picture arrived years before we knew a single thing she thought about. It was an image made for the male gaze, and then the tabloids took it from there, printing it and reprinting it, deciding how she should look and what she should be, until it stopped being a picture of her and became the whole idea of her.

Then she started showing up at fashion shows in Paris with no makeup on, and I couldn’t stop looking. It interrupted the picture. Once the picture was interrupted I went looking, and I found a woman who had played Roxie Hart on Broadway, who had written a memoir with her own poems in it, who had clearly been thinking and reading and making things for a very long time. So I had to ask myself a slightly uncomfortable question. Had she changed, or had I finally looked? Almost nothing I found was new. It had been there all along. It just never made it onto the poster.

When your brand keeps introducing an earlier you

I’m not talking about a broken brand. I’m talking about a brand that is beautiful and professional and doing exactly what you designed it to do five years ago. The trouble is that you don’t want what you wanted five years ago. You know more now. Your taste has sharpened, your work has deepened, and you’ve lived through things that changed what you care about. Somewhere in all of that, the way you present your business quietly stopped keeping up, and it’s very hard to see from the inside, especially when the old version worked.

People make decisions with whatever you’ve given them, and when the picture is incomplete they fill in the rest themselves. They put you in the wrong category, assume you’re earlier in your career than you are, or hire you for something you can still do beautifully and no longer want to spend your days doing. And then you find yourself in the same conversation over and over, the one that begins with “Actually, I also do…” If you are constantly explaining something essential about your business, your brand has stopped doing the explaining for you.

Inside my own head, the connections are obvious

I’m writing about this because I’m in it. I built a business on photography. I’ve photographed extraordinary places and people, my work has run in Harper’s Bazaar and Martha Stewart, and I’ve taught workshops all over the world. Photography is still how I see. But I also want to write, and coach, and help people understand the stories they’re telling about themselves and how those stories become the businesses and lives they build.

To me the line is obvious. Photography is storytelling, storytelling is identity, and identity shapes how you show up in your business. But nobody landing on my website lives inside my head. They have the photographs, the words, the offers and the things I talk about most, and if every one of those says photographer, I can’t be surprised when photographer is what they remember. One announcement about coaching isn’t going to undo years of very consistent communication.

What I keep coming back to is that none of this is new for me either. Before I ever picked up a camera I was teaching English. I studied directing at NYU and worked on Broadway. I’ve spent my whole life thinking about character, motive and meaning, and the way a story makes you feel something before you can explain why. Those things didn’t disappear when I started taking pictures. They came with me, and they’re in every photograph, every brand I help build, and every session with a woman trying to understand why she keeps casting herself in the same role.

Nobody invented that sentence

I saw this recently with a client whose brand I helped rebuild. The credential that ended up leading her new homepage, the line that made people sit up, was already on her old website. It was near the bottom of the page, where nobody would ever find it. Nobody invented that sentence. Somebody moved it.

That is most of what a good rebrand is. It isn’t invention, it’s promotion: you take the truest thing about you out of the basement and put it where people can see it. A new photograph might stop someone, but stopping them is only the door. Once they look again, what do they learn? Can they understand how you think, see what you help people do, and know what to do next? The image and the words have to tell the same story. A rebrand is not a new look. It’s a decision made visible.

Brave Questions 1. What does my brand currently tell people to hire me for? Look at what’s actually there, not what you meant: your homepage, your bio, your photographs, the offer you mention most. If you knew nothing else about yourself, what would you conclude? 2. What do I want to be hired for now? Be specific about the work you want more of, who you want to do it for, and what you want people to understand about what you bring. 3. Where’s the gap? Maybe the offer is clear but your photographs promise a different experience. Maybe the visuals are right and the words could belong to anyone. Or maybe the work you most want to do is sitting in your basement, exactly where my client’s best sentence was.

You don’t have to solve your whole identity this weekend. Make one move: explain one offer more clearly, replace one photograph that no longer looks like you, or finally say out loud the thing you’ve been keeping in the background. Then take one honest look at the way you’re introducing yourself to the world, and ask whether it gives the woman you are today enough room.

In this episode

• What Pamela Anderson’s makeup-free appearances revealed about how we see people
• Why an image repeated often enough becomes the whole story
• The cost of a brand that’s still introducing an earlier version of you
• Why one announcement can’t undo years of consistent communication
• My own evolution from photographer to writer and coach
• Why the best rebrands are promotion, not invention
• Three questions to find the gap between your brand and the work you want now

Let’s talk

If this sounds familiar, I want to hear about it. Reply to my newsletter and tell me what has changed in your work, what’s become hard to explain, and where people still seem to be seeing an older version of you. I read every one. [NEWSLETTER LINK]