Self-Improvement Is Just a Brand
How many times have you found some content on self-improvement helpful? Is it even possible that so many people could teach so many other people how to improve? What does ‘improve’ mean?
Reading tons of articles and watching tens of courses on self-improvement wherever available on the internet, the legitimate doubt arises: is it just an easy trend to follow that winks at followers and clients, like a brand?
Meaning
Let’s have a closer look at what self-improvement does mean. Following the Cambridge Dictionary:
Self-improvement: the activity of learning new things on your own that make you a more skilled or able person.
Ideally, everyone loves learning new things. Actually, not. Even less so when it comes to learning on your own.
But that’s the point: ideally. Who does not like ideal situations? Better: who does not desire to live an ideal life?
An ideal life shows up the best version of you which results from consistent improvements. As a consequence, the audience that’s eager to listen about self-improvement is huge.
The point is that millions of people dream of improving, and that’s where the magic happens.
Where there’s a dream of millions of people, there’s a brand, which embodies the dream. And where a brand succeeds, it becomes a trend.
Brand and trend
I love to think that words that have similar sounds also have some roots in common. Look at the case of trend and brand.
Following again the Cambridge Dictionary:
Brand: a type of product made by a particular company and sold under a particular name.
and
Trend: a general development or change in a situation or in the way that people are behaving.
So, based on these definitions, a brand is a name that can be sold, together with its product, and a trend is a behavior change.
Then the common root of brand and trend is: selling a change (which describes the aim of almost all business enterprises).
Back to the dream of self-improvement.
Having the consistency of the dream, self-improvement is a desire. The desire of millions of people is the fuel of a brand. And a brand survives when a trend supports it.
Self-improvement as a brand is a bridge that connects a dream — the ideal life — to the millions of people that dream the better — to its trend.
But the toughest thing is to act and improve, since dreaming is easy, and speaking about a dream is even easier.
Instead, when it comes to acting, it comes out that you need instructions: you need a breakdown of self-improvement into actionable statements. And this breakdown holds a surprise: the result is pure common sense. Difficult to implement, but extremely easy to say,
It’s all about common sense
The marketing aspect of the common roots of trend and brand is crucial. Trend and brand give voice to a problem that deserves a solution which, as a consequence, has a value and can be sold.
The solution to the dream, packed with all the bits of advice and tricks that are available on the internet on self-improvement, can be summarized in a few sentences:
- Well define your goals
- Play the long game
- Avoid procrastination
- Balance the many aspects of your life
Even adding some further sentences to the above list, the result as a whole can be honestly and simply labeled as common sense.
Speaking of improvements, who would ever claim that goals don’t matter, that the future doesn’t matter, that acting now doesn’t matter… and so on?
If so, the self-improvement business, both as a brand and a trend, sells common sense. That’s the product.
Conclusions
It’d be a mistake to under-evaluate common sense and consider its selling as selling ice to Eskimos.
Nevertheless, it comes out that self-improvement as a brand addresses the dream of being better, and, when it comes to realizing a dream, people usually expect a bit more than pure common sense.
Likely, self-improvement is more attitude than skill, so there’s no way to teach an attitude through a course as it happens for skills, because you can convey an attitude only by example. Not by instructions.
Instead, once self-improvement is perceived as a brand it appears as a product that you can buy to leverage its value, as is. This leads to forgetting the most important ingredient of the recipe of self-improvement: discipline.
The fact is that you cannot buy discipline.
But self-improvement as a brand hides this. The consequence is that it sells just a dream, not the way to make it real.
Don’t you think?
