Corporate branding first emerged as a practical measure. In the 1920s, the rise of American consumer culture produced a glut of products that couldn’t be differentiated from one another on sight. The branding that emerged around them has, at points, had a glimmer of utility to it, serving as a way to establish the authenticity and reliability of a particular thing from a particular source. But the idea of a “brand” rapidly spread beyond that seal of quality and subsumed a whole constellation of sentiments a company might provoke in a person, many of them wholly abstracted from the product itself. In her 1999 book, “No Logo,” Naomi Klein presents the acceleration of corporate branding as a kind of hollowing out: Companies that used to manufacture wares or harvest foods — that used to sell things — became brands, which sell ideas. Actual production processes became secondary, outsourced to far-flung subcontractors. The brand’s real investment was to imbue the products with meaning. “Nike isn’t a running-shoe company,” Klein wrote in the 10th-anniversary edition, “it is about the idea of transcendence through sports.”

At its core, branding is a process of humanization: It imbues companies with personalities. Often the personification is overt. Once there were Aunt Jemima and Betty Crocker; now there’s the Trump Organization and Fenty Beauty. As the celebrity adman Bruce Barton once said: “Institutions have souls, just as men and nations have souls.” A company with a soul becomes relatable, but in a deceptive way: The more we think of it as a “brand,” the more our focus shifts away from things like labor practices and supply chains and onto issues of narrative and identity.

So Wendy’s, which used to be personified by a little red-haired girl or by its founder, Dave Thomas, is now personified by a social-media team renowned for its ability to tweet like a rude teenager. But if companies have come to act more like people, the reverse is also true: Now people act like companies, carefully monitoring the meanings we project into the world. The “brand management” of the Wendy’s team happens right alongside that of actual teenagers, who shape their images to attract attention and good will. Build up enough of those things, and a person, much like a company, can become profitable. A blockbuster persona like Rihanna’s might translate into the marketability of a $59 “body luminizer”; a “Bachelor” contestant’s persona might be limited to endorsing herbal supplements on Instagram; a popular internet figure might simply crowdfund to cover expenses. Companies still try to sell us things, but now we’re encouraged to pitch ourselves to them, too. A “lifestyle brand,” after all, is just a regular brand that appeals to people’s “personal brands” — which, in turn, are increasingly organized around courting relationships with lifestyle brands. It all collapses into branding.

“Personal brand” was coined by a writer named Tom Peters in a Fast Company article, “The Brand Called You.” This was in 1997, as lifestyle branding was beginning to emerge: “All kinds of products,” Peters wrote, “are figuring out how to transcend the narrow boundaries of their categories and become a brand surrounded by Tommy Hilfiger-like buzz.” At the end of the essay, he plugged his new CD-ROM.