I am not a brand … I am a free man!” (Apologies to Patrick McGoohan; may The Prisoner rest in peace.)

How much time do you spend worrying about your brand? Not your company’s brand, yours. If you believe some marketing and new-media gurus, you need to be vigilant about your brand: You’ve got Kleenex brand tissue, Yardley brand soap, Degree brand deodorant—and Walt Crawford brand writer, editor, and speaker. Right?

Wrong. At least it is for me, and I’d like to believe it would be wrong for some of you too.

I’m not a brand. I’m a person. My colleagues in the library and publishing fields are all actual people. I probably converse (electronically) with more than a thousand library people that I’ve not yet met. I find that when I do meet someone with whom I’ve corresponded, it’s almost always a pleasurable surprise.

If people really were brands, that wouldn’t be so. I would know enough about the Dorothea Salo Experience to be sure exactly what I’d get in person. Michelle Manafy brand editor would be right in line with brand expectations, and that would be especially true for Tom Peters brand business management guru, one of the great exponents of “the brand called you.” An expectation of personal brand consistency would actually cause me to avoid meeting quite a few people—the glib, always-right gurus who are never less than certain and whose prescriptions can always be summed up in a sentence or a padded business bestseller.

You know some of these slick, brand-name individuals. You may even be one of them. I wonder if maybe, among Negroponte, Shirky, Peters, Anderson, Kelly, Godin, and that pack (nearly all white men, for what it’s worth), there’s actually someone who’s down-to-earth and even occasionally unsure of his ideas.

Tom Peters said it in Fast Company back in August or September 1997 (the article bears varied dates online): “We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You.” You need to “establish your own micro equivalent of the Nike swoosh.” You can’t just do good things, you have to “create a distinctive role for yourself” with a “strategy to promote the brand called You.” You have to decide what you want to be famous for. You must constantly enhance your profile. You must package yourself as your “most important job.”

It’s not just Peters. Daniel Lair, Katie Sullivan, and George Cheney wrote “Marketization and the Recasting of the Professional Self” in Management Communication Quarterly in 2005, discussing the “personal branding movement” and need for “self-commodification.” Dan Schawbel, who’s pushing the concept at About.com and on his Personal Branding Blog, has a book coming out on building a “powerful brand” to achieve career success. Brenda Bence offers How YOU™ Are Like Shampoo: The Breakthrough Personal Branding System. Peter Montoya offers The Brand Called You. There are many, many more—I get 772 results for the phrase “personal brand” in a Google Books search. That phrase in Google Blog Search yields more than 20,000 results, and it even shows the full text of 1,000 actual results from a wild variety of blogs.

Hubert Rampersad tells us that our personal brand should be “authentic.” (He urges you to define and formulate “an authentic, distinctive, relevant, consistent, concise, meaningful, exciting, inspiring, compelling, enduring, crystal clear, ambitious, persuasive and memorable Personal Brand promise”—and once you’ve run the gauntlet of those 15 adjectives, how can you go wrong?) Rampersad summarized his personal brand (and logo!) on a small card that he keeps in his pocket, one way to assure that you authentically become your honest brand.

I’m not having it. I am not a personal brand. I am a person. I don’t believe personal marketing is or should be our highest or primary activity. I don’t believe self-packaging should come ahead of doing good work, helping others, treating ourselves and our loved ones well, and broadening our horizons. I believe an “authentic personal brand” is oxymoronic: You’ve given up your authenticity in order to define your personal brand.

I’m also not wild about the need to define ourselves and maintain consistency within that definition. I was recently paid a high compliment by an old friend—that I was constantly reinventing myself. Which is the antithesis of proper personal branding—but a good route to staying as young as possible and getting the most out of life. It is, in other words, a way to stay human—something no brand can ever be.