STANDING AT THE FRONT of the large, fluorescent-lit high school cafeteria that serves as the Learning Annex's main classroom, wearing black jeans and chunky silver pinky ring, Rick Haskins looks very much the auteur. The cafeteria could be a practice room and we, the thirty-odd audience members, his cast, assembled for a first read-through of our script. Indeed, the women seated on plastic chairs around me -- aging bohemian beauty queens, with wildly frizzing hair and kohl-rimmed eyes -- gaze at Haskins with the mixture of fear and devotion grateful actresses might lavish on their directors, an adoration more typically bestowed on Hollywood stars and leaders of religious cults.

Yet Haskins earns his keep as a director of consumers, not actors: He's a marketing executive. Recently, he's reinvented himself as a self-styled "personal branding guru." Clearly a repressed actor, the fortyish Haskins has found his calling in the multibillion-dollar self-help movement, traveling around the country preaching his provocative philosophy at seminars, conventions, adult education classes, you name it. Elaborated in his recently released book Brand Yourself (cowritten with David Andrusia, an L.A. writer who offers one-on-one career counseling sessions), Haskins's message is simple and timely: He believes that real, live human beings -- you and I -- should think of ourselves as products.

What's interesting about Haskins is not his reliance on the concept of branding, which has been a staple of marketing for decades, but the people who've found a savior in him. The thirty people in the cafeteria with me are singers, painters, sculptors, actors, inventors, writers. They are all in their forties and fifties, more than half are women, and all are dressed in what can best be described as "artistic" clothing (think high-school art teacher, circa 1972). These are the boat people of the new economy -- aging urban baby boomers who didn't get the gallery shows or the leading roles twenty years ago, or who have decided to leave their day jobs to pursue more whimsical ambitions. They allowed the tech revolution and the workplace revolution to pass them by. Now, gazing about with tired optimism, they seem to be asking, "What happened while I was sleeping? How can I catch up?"

TUCKING INTO AN ENORMOUS SIRLOIN at the Palm, a few days prior to the Learning Annex seminar, Haskins doesn't seem like a man who has the patience to guide a bunch of dreamers into the twenty-first century. Gesticulating wildly with his knife and leaning low over his dwindling steak, he is an impassioned prophet, a man whose speech is heavily italicized. "I am a most hated speaker," he tells me, "because I just have one thing to say and people don't want to hear it. People say, 'I am not a product! How dare you say I am a product.' But companies do treat us as products."

Instead of fighting them, Haskins suggests we beat the big guys at their own game, salvaging the tools of marketing in the same way an ethnic group might appropriate a racial slur, spinning the derogatory term into one of empowerment. To his mind, if I say I am a product and treat myself as such in the world of work, then not only will I be less disgruntled when I am regarded as such, but I will be better able to perform to the best of my ability in the areas where I naturally excel. I like to think of this as the Haskins Superhero Theory: In the mythical world of comic books and Saturday morning cartoons, superheroes generally possess one primary super power. Spiderman, for example, climbs walls. If we can climb walls, Haskins would say, then we should focus on climbing walls, rather than simultaneously trying to fly faster than a speeding bullet. Spiderman wouldn't be so appealing, would he, if he was also a kind of second-rate Superman? And so, we too, must decide which skill forms the base for our brand, and title ourselves accordingly. We must become Editorwomans and Superaccountants.

THE UNITED STATES' CURRENT love affair with new-economy culture is such that you -- reading this article -- are probably at least vaguely familiar with the history of branding, which begins with the industrial revolution, when mass-produced products began to replace locally manufactured items. The term "branding" didn't actually enter the marketer's vocabulary until the thirties, when Procter & Gamble (where Rick Haskins began his career, incidentally) solved the problem of competition between their various soap lines by building up a "brand identity" for each of the different products. That's why we think of Ivory as a gentle all-purpose soap and Camay as a women's face soap, despite the fact that they contain essentially the same ingredients. In the mid-nineties, when the Internet economy began to take off, branding reached another level of importance -- and abstraction -- as online companies fought to define their often-intangible products.

Three years ago, in the midst of this online branding frenzy, the concept of personal branding arose. Fast Company devoted an issue to the subject, featuring a characteristically sensational cover article by maverick business analyst Tom Peters. "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," Peters declared. Though Haskins and Andrusia reportedly signed the contract for Brand Yourself five months before Peters's article was published, it is Peters -- already a business-world superstar and branding expert -- who became known as the father of personal branding. But while Peters aims to transform the corporate workplace into a "way cool" network of creative individuals, Haskins is more interested in empowering the sole proprietor, the freelancer, the independent agent -- or, to get metaphysical, the self. As one reviewer of Brand Yourself has suggested, Haskins is attaching a new vocabulary to the concepts of self-empowerment, and he seems genuinely concerned with helping people get more personal satisfaction from their careers.

"I'm kind of the poor man's Tom Peters," Haskins suggests to me on the phone one day, half-joking. "My book is for the little guy." There's much truth to his jest. One of the sacred rules of traditional branding is, of course, "know your product," which, when translated into identity-branding, becomes "know yourself." In order to brand yourself, you must first figure out what you really and truly want to be branded as. "You can't falsely brand yourself," Haskins insists, "If you try to brand yourself as something you're not really good at or don't really care about, you're going to fail." Brand Yourself thus purports to lead the reader along a path of self-discovery. Like most self-help manuals, the book is full of quizzes and worksheets, all designed to root out strengths, skills, likes, and dislikes. At various points in the self-evaluation process -- which is supposed to take fifteen days -- you are instructed to submit your results to a focus group of friends and colleagues (much as a product would be tested before hitting the stores). It's all about consistency: If everyone agrees that, yes, you are articulate, you should include the quality in your brand.

IN A SENSE, actors and writers and other creative professionals have long been "branding" themselves by cultivating an instantly recognizable style and a distinctive persona. Still, it's jarring to hear them talk about their work unself-consciously in the language of business, and I'm a little surprised at how enthusiastically they embrace the salesman's clichés that Haskins offers. "As writers and artists, we have to market ourselves," insists beauty writer Karen Tina Harrison, who was profiled in Haskins's book, "or we have nothing. We are literally selling ourselves. Personal branding is a very intelligent thing." It certainly worked for Harrison: As a young beauty editor at the now-defunct Sassy, Harrison heard that the New York Post was looking to hire a beauty editor. "I wanted that job," she tells me, laughing, "and so I created an identity for myself: Glamour Slut." As Glamour Slut, Harrison wrote to the editor who was doing the hiring, mailing her materials in a big pink envelope sealed with a kiss-shaped sticker. She got the job, despite the fact that the Sassy gig was her first as a full-time beauty editor.

Haskins's newest followers are as fervent Harrison; at the seminar they eagerly ask questions about how to pinpoint and get to know their markets. A few prove slightly resistant to his central idea. The nervous woman sitting next to me argues with him, offering examples of celebrities like John Tesh who have attained success in more than one field. (Haskins agrees, albeit begrudgingly, that the rare person can create two unique brands for herself, but only after succeeding with a single, finely-honed brand.) No one, however, regards him with anything but admiration. When Haskins promises his audience the chance to meet with him privately to discuss their "brands," they emit a rumble of collective anticipation. Soon after, he passes out copies of Brand Yourself -- free as a Gideon Bible -- and talks to the people who crowd around him, mostly those who were too shy to speak during the seminar.

When the hubbub dies down, I talk to the painter, Frank Boros -- a craggy Kris Kristofferson type with a booming voice and a manner of practiced confidence. "I make a living with my paintbrush," he says with a toothy smile that unsettles me, "and I've been doing so for over two years. And I live on the Upper West Side." He registered for the class because he sought to "language" himself "through the world [he] wanted." After he completes the fifteen-day branding process laid out in Brand Yourself, Boros and I speak again. He is giddy with self-discovery, but vague on specifics. "I'm finding it very beneficial," he tells me breathlessly, "What I get from it is: 'Know who you are.' And from there you can be really clear on your presentation."

At the seminar, Haskins had suggested that Boros -- who does a fair amount of commissioned work and does not yet have regular representation in New York (though he has agents in smaller markets) -- target those who possess the means and desire to purchase his works and befriend them. "Get lists from galleries," Haskins insisted, drowning out the painter's objections to this idea. "Send these people Christmas cards, birthday cards. Get invited to their parties. Invite them to your parties." Boros has already started on this social enterprise, hosting parties in the studio he always thought too small and badly decorated for visits from potential collectors. He and Haskins have been corresponding regularly, and Boros is duly impressed with his new mentor. "I like him as a person," he explains. " I believe that he is an honest and good person, someone who is really committed to helping people."

When Haskins and I speak again, he too is giddy with excitement. The seminars have been quite well attended lately -- fifty to sixty-five people -- and attendees are showing up with copies of his book under their arm. He's counting the days until he hits the road and the real dog-and-pony show begins. "You know, I never wrote this book to make money. You don't get any money for a book. I wrote it to help people," he tells me. Hours later, I decide that I believe him, perhaps because the techniques and values he espouses seem to me less cultlike, more a sort of trickster's art for the underdog. What he proposes to his followers is not so much selling out as buying in -- buying in to the dominant culture, where truisms of the marketplace are freely applied to all aspects of personal and professional life. In exchange for colluding in the frenzied celebration of buy-and-sell, his followers can maintain their independence where it really matters: They are free to do creative work for a living. And that's no small return on their investment.

Joanna Smith Rakoff is an editor at About.com. She contributes regularly to Shout and theSan Francisco Chronicle.

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