Personal branding is a rapidly growing phenomenon taking place in multistakeholder ecosystems. This article builds on ethnographic fieldwork from the rock-climbing industry in the US and Europe to show how stakeholders enable and shape the personal branding practices of professional climbers. Findings demonstrate that personal branding is a highly social practice wherein stakeholders provide three types of resources to elaborate personal brands: material resources, informational resources, and symbolic resources. In addition, six main conventions guiding stakeholders’ relationships and enabling resource transfer are then identified and theorized. Finally, these findings are built upon to suggest a framework to analyze stakeholder cooperation in personal branding.

Introduction

Personal branding refers to the creation and management of personal brands by people who apply marketing principles to themselves for promotional purposes (Pagis & Ailon, 2017; Shepherd, 2005). This type of branding is a central concern for many professionals, such as athletes (e.g., Arai, Ko, & Kaplanidou, 2013), models (e.g., Parmentier, Fischer, & Reuber, 2013), knowledge workers (e.g., Bandinelli & Arvidsson, 2013; Gandini, 2016), bloggers and influencers (e.g., Duffy & Hund, 2015; Erz & Christensen, 2018). People increasingly use social media to elaborate and disseminate a particular image of themselves (Duffy & Hund, 2015; Marwick, 2013). Scholars have described their motivations as self-serving and calculated (e.g., Hearn, 2008, 2010), embedded in the growing marketization of social relationships across professional contexts supported by digital technologies (Gandini, 2016). This literature suggests that personal branding is a highly individual practice sharing similarities with product branding. However, brands are not created in isolation, but through the complex set of social relationships established among interrelated stakeholders (Michel, 2017; Von Wallpach, Hemetsberger, & Espersen, 2017). These stakeholders play active roles in branding processes by providing resources (Pera, Occhiocupo, & Clarke, 2016). They may have different expectations when collaborating with a brand (Jones, 2005), varying resources and power (Mäläskä, Saraniemi, & Tähtinen, 2011), and diverse backgrounds and norms (Hillebrand, Driessen, & Koll, 2015). Despite this acknowledgment of the role of stakeholders in branding, their potential participation in personal branding has received little attention. A consequence is that knowledge on the influence and role of stakeholders in the creation of personal brands remains limited to descriptive accounts of the multistakeholder ecosystems where personal brands are built.