Rebranding: The New Obsession To Self Market

If you’ve been on social media at all in the past year, you’ve most likely heard the term “rebrand”. Not in the traditional sense, as in updating a company by giving it a new name, look, and overall altering how it is perceived by its consumers. No, this “rebrand” is about altering yourself. The term especially skyrocketed around January 2026, first gaining awareness in late December 2025. One can assume it was a different way to discuss New Year’s resolutions. Or, just a usual shift in trends and attitudes with the promise of 2026 ahead. 

However, a personal rebrand is the New Years resolution mindset in the extreme. It means erasing your past aesthetics, personality, habits, and sometimes social circles. Losing weight, changing your entire wardrobe, makeup style, and essentially curating a brand new you. 

Especially around early January, people turned to hobbies that were aesthetically pleasing, especially for posting online. Scrapbooking, photography, “junk journaling”, video editing, fitness content, etc. The pursuit of creative activities is never a bad thing, but in the event of a rebrand, it becomes less about your personal art and interests but more about whether you think everyone else likes your new interests. Rebranding turned into making yourself palatable to an unknown niche yet widespread audience. 

A prominent icon of the rebranding movement is Addison Rae. She was once known as a member of Hype House, consistently posting dance TikToks and upholding a standard “girl next door” look with comfortable and “basic” clothing. After a few unpopular music releases as well as a fairly cringe worthy Netflix movie, she struck gold with her recent album ‘Addison’. But leading up to her debut, she had been crafting her new pop star Britney Spears and Madonna-esque look. Her rebrand consisted of a complete change in media content, featuring a new dreamy, indie sleaze, mermaid-like, dance inspired aesthetic. 

“Self branding” can be a positive in certain cases. When you are actually building a business that begins with your image, finding your footing in the music industry, maybe even your writing style. Icons like Sabrina Carpenter, Charli XCX, George Orwell, Zendaya and most famously Dolly Parton, had a successful rebrand. 

However, for most people, it is not normal to market yourself to a widespread audience. Additionally, how do you begin to rebrand who you are, when you have no concept of yourself? The main issue with the rebrand is how easy it is to just fall into a million other micro trends and lose who you are to the pursuit of wanting online fame, or just wanting to be well liked by a wide audience. Social media has forced us to see perfectly handpicked and filtered versions of millions of lives, and it is how we display our own personas.  

Building new habits, hobbies, and overall finding out your likes and dislikes takes time, discipline, and interest. Before diving into a full fledged change of self, one should ask themselves why and who are they doing this for? 

A rebrand is a means to self market, to commodify yourself into a persona that can be bought from, and most of the time, become mainstream. It’s important to appreciate yourself in the current moment, and build who you are for yourself, not for outward validation from an invisible audience. 

• #social media
• persona
• rebrand