Personal branding of artists and art-designers: necessity or desire?

Abstract

Purpose Personal branding becomes a new in-demand skill for all professionals today. To be well-known helps to achieve success in the networked business environment. Personal relationships and a good reputation in the reality of network economy help young artists and art designers move up the career ladder. This paper aims to discuss a problem of artists who often find it difficult to define their artistic and self-distinction identities. The concept of personal brand and branding seems quite irrelevant, especially in reference to their own selves. People usually associate branding with marketing, which in our minds is usually the same as “pushy” and aggressive sales practices. Their find problematic to promote themselves. The purpose of this paper is to highlight that, based on existing theories, artistic identity creation in connection with the skill of personal branding is crucial for personal success in the profession of today’s young artists and art designers. Design/methodology/approach The study was conducted based on the data originally collected among artists, designers, architecture professionals and students. The data have been analyzed with the equal structural equation modeling method. Findings This paper presents empirical evidence that if artists view themselves as personal brands, it affects their personal performance in a positive way. Practical implications Authors claim that a teaching curriculum for young adult artists should include a personal branding program, to help them find and support their artistic identity and express their personal values and self-brand distinction, and leverage them to build their professional career. Originality/value This is one of the first studies to quantify the self-brand performance of young art designers as a benefit of being self-brand oriented.