5 tips to boost your brand borrowed from RuPaul
How creative entrepreneurs can build a brand on zero budget
Hiya 🌊! I’m Lucy from Hype Yourself. I chat about self-promotion and creative living. If you are new to this page, pop your email below to ensure you receive my posts.
Hiya 🌊,
A WhatsApp chat with
prompted a costume change for today’s planned post and selected this from my stack of drafts.One of the ways to make us feel more confident as creatives is to know ourselves truly, what our brand is, and what we stand for.
I only learned to wrangle my brand when the cofounder of my children Hadrien, joined my business to launch a branding arm. The first thing he did was present a brand strategy for the business - a lightbulb moment.
We co-authored a book, Brand Yourself, in which I was the brawn and he was the brain. Through the writing process, I truly understood the connection and overlap between PR and brand.
The biggest myth to dispel is that branding is all about your colours and logo.
Others include:
self-promotion and personal brand are icky (if it feels like that, you are probably not being true to yourself!)
we shouldn't have to promote ourselves and let our work speak for itself
OR that only brands with a large budget or celebrities can afford a brand strategy
A strong brand underpins your business success. Your writing, product or service might be brilliant, but if lost in an incohesive brand, you make life unnecessarily more difficult for yourself.
The best bit? We can borrow from big businesses and apply them to ourselves.
This week, RuPaul’s memoir The House of Hidden Meanings launched. It feels as good a time as any to share my love for RuPaul.
Why RuPaul?
If you don’t know him, RuPaul is most famous for hosting RuPaul’s Drag Race. I’m currently watching the sixteenth season of the U.S. version, Belgium season 2 (good for my French) and UK v’s the World 2. (I’ll spare you the rest of my fangirl behaviour of live shows attended, franchises consumed and merch procured).
He has won fourteen Emmys, is an author, singer, actor, producer, and model, and is widely acclaimed for bringing drag culture into the mainstream.
My children's co-founder and I are obsessed. There are many reasons, including the joyful glimmers juxtaposed against emotional stories from LGBTQIA+ communities.
Today, I want to share why he is also an excellent blueprint for people like us regarding brand building. Let’s go.
Five ways to build your brand like RuPaul
1. Show a bit of ankle
RuPaul shares the same anecdotes again and again, whether it was the first time he had a picnic with his sisters, his time as the lead singer of a punk rock band, meeting his husband George, or his love of Diana Ross, musicals, fashion, and design.
We feel like we know him, which helps us connect to him as the audience.
There will be so many more stories and parts of RuPaul that we don’t see.
Takeaway: We don’t have to share everything about ourselves to build a personal brand. Write down a list of the key moments in your life that you are comfortable sharing and recycle them.
Think less about me. More about a theme and show us a bit of ankle online.
2. Know your values
Have you ever accepted a writing collaboration, speaking opportunity or client because they were a more prominent name than you only to regret it later because they were not aligned to your values?
RuPaul is so sure of his values that every cultural reference he shares magnifies his personality. We know he is into colours, does not take life too seriously, does not let emotions control him, and plays with fashion and design.
From the Rusical challenges to the songs selected for lipsynching to the brand partnerships of competition prizes, everything aligns with his values.
PR and brand building are more than getting into the press. They are everything you do to manage your relationship with the public. Whoever you partner with, write for, sit on panels with, or appear on podcasts should reflect your values.
Example: Ru giving a shout out to Texas and Beyonce
Takeaway: Write down all your values, then circle your top 3-5. Always use this as a cross-check before promoting anything or anyone outside of your work.
3. Shamelessly share your projects
RuPaul regularly jokes about what he is promoting with unsubtle cuts to plugs such as ‘available now on iTunes’ when one of his tracks is played on an episode.
As he says in his own words: when the person on stage is having a good time, we have a good time with them.
I am often approached by people who want help with promotion after launching a course, book, online product, or physical store and are struggling to get bums on seats. They have not found joy in sharing their work, and it’s sabotaging their business success.
Sharing once is not enough. Repeat. Sharing once is not enough.
If you look at Ru’s recent posts on Instagram, you will see that he is having fun plugging his memoir in various posts.
Example: Ru having fun with his book promotion
Takeaway: You must find a fun way to talk about your work. You love what you do, right? Marketing, brand building, and promotion shouldn’t be a chore—it is about helping others find what you have made for them.
4. Imagery and visuals
A stunning font is better than a mediocre logo - Hadrien Chatelet
The first episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race launched in 2009. Besides the often joked-about frosting filter of Season 1, little has changed aesthetically.
Whatever the franchise, it has the same logo, font, theme music and visual identity from the interior designer of the werkroom to the style of the runway stage.
If you don’t have a budget to build branding assets, start with a unique font. My Hype Yourself logo is an example.
Return to your values from tip two and ensure fluidity across your posts so that your visuals and aesthetics are linked and instantly recognisable.
Example: Werkroom visuals - Ru is always in a jazzy suit (in this example he is also setting an exercise based around his book - a nod to point 4)
Takeaway: Are you bored with your branding visuals? Keep them for at least another two years. Select imagery for your posts that enhances your brand values, not confuses them.
5. Unreasonably consistent
Linking to the point above. I’m not saying you can’t evolve, start new things or change direction, BUT you must keep unreasonable consistency.
Whenever RuPaul enters the werkroom he starts with saying “Hello, hello, hello”.
He ends every episode with telling us ‘If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell are you going to love somebody else”.
I’ve lost count of the number of catchphrases and repeatable formats repeated throughout every international franchise and the different challenges of each episode.
Examples include The Snatch game maxi challenge, which always follows the mini-reading challenge; the pit crew, called the frites crew in France or Brit crew in the UK; and not forgetting, “everybody loves puppets.”
The most successful Drag Queens from each season are not always those who came first place but the ones who truly know their brand. They have their signature makeup, fashion sense, talent and catchphrases - these can evolve, but we never lose the character.
Takeaways: For Substackers, podcasters, content creators, and anyone promoting themselves online, consider how you open and close your social media posts, presentations, and public speaking. Do your posts follow a format, or do you have a handful of formats depending on your post type? What are your signature catchphrases? How can you incorporate these?
My monthly email, The Hype, has been the same for 5 years. Header titles such as Parish News or Friends & Family, the masthead and imagery selected.
Easy, unreasonably consistent things to try:
Can you create a repeatable format for your newsletter or social posts?
Can you take some time to bank similar images for future posts?
Set some guardrails of people you will or won’t partner with
What anecdotes have you shared that resonated? How can you recycle?
📣 BRAND YOURSELF
📚 If you need more support and exercises to help build your brand, including a FREE downloadable workbook, check out my small business book Brand Yourself, written with my colour enthusiast and French dyslexic partner in life, Hadrien Chatelet.
Keep on hyping.
Lucy x
P.S. Quick ankle share to sign off. I often liken my online presence to that of a drag queen version of myself. It is still me but a heightened, more confident, and (hopefully) funnier version. For a long time, my old agency, The Wern, was based on a nickname from one of my Directors when I was a junior PR - I almost saw Lucy Werner and The Wern as two separate identities. The latter was confident and had it all together, the other not so much. These days, we are much more intertwined.
"Write down all your values, then circle your top 3-5. Always use this as a cross-check before promoting anything or anyone outside of your work."
Spot on! Any project, great or small, needs to be rooted in your values. When you operate outside what you value, you are begging for disaster. Worse yet, is if you don't know what you value. Make the investment to find out. Great insights here.
Love this Lucy! I always sign my social posts and newsletters off with ‘wishing you a Merry Menopause’ - I didn’t know I had a catchphrase!! Have a super Sunday and Mother’s Day. Jo 🙏🏻