Performance and productivity coach Jamie Thurber isn’t a woman who’s easily shaken, but occasionally, she’s stirred.
Thurber, who I met through a mutual colleague, was once telling a client that she handled a similar situation to what he was going through by making a lewd statement to someone. “There was dead silence, and I thought to myself, ‘That’s it, I’ve crossed a line. I’ve gone too far.’ It turns out, he loved it.”
This is on brand for her and a growing number of entrepreneurs (myself included) who incorporate swearing into their brand messaging. Episodes of Gary Vaynerchuk’s “DailyVee” feel a little lackluster without an f-bomb. Tony Robbins brings a room to laughter with choice language. Glennon Doyle has proven that sometimes the most spiritual thing you can possibly do is curse.
Profanity in personal branding is definitely hot right now.
But it’s not without its critics. My own mother, for example, sent me this Facebook message a few months ago: “Your dad and I are curious as to why every one of your posts has foul language? We wonder if it’s intentional or just happens because, honestly, in our world, it doesn't seem professional and it would knock you off our list.”
It is intentional. When I swear, I do it because that’s genuinely how I would talk. Even in grad school, my professors were not immune to throwing out a curse word in a seminar and they definitely weren’t shy about showing profane artworks. My brand is a reflection of how I speak.
As Thurber says, swearing serves as a filtering mechanism; because it’s polarizing language, if you can’t handle it on her website or sales page, you won’t enjoy working with her as a coach. “If someone is meant to be my client, they’re going to resonate with the passion and integrity that comes from swearing. If they can’t deal with that, we shouldn’t be working together anyway.”
Thurber actually started her business by following conventional, non-swearing logic, but it felt inauthentic to her. “When it’s natural for me to drop an f-bomb, censoring myself felt fake. The whole reason I started my own business was so that I could do it on my terms.”
She’s not wrong. According to an international group of academic researchers, profanity can actually be a marker of honesty. “We found a consistent positive relationship between profanity and honesty; profanity was associated with less lying and deception at the individual level, and with higher integrity at the society level.”
So for Thurber, swearing is one of the ways that she comes across on the internet as her most authentic self, which she says is far more accepted by men than it is by women. “I have a lot of male clients and a large male audience; it is much more accepted when I curse by males than it is by females. I think women need to understand that it doesn’t make you any less of a woman or any less feminine or classy to curse, if that’s what you feel called to do.”
But her business isn’t all sunshine and swear words, either. She has received criticism for her use of profanity. “I got private messages from people I didn’t even know saying that if I didn’t curse, they’d be more likely to hire me. Or, ‘It must be interesting to think that you need to lower yourself to that level of intelligence.’”
These criticisms are reflective of attitudes about swearing in the workplace. While almost half of Gen X and baby boomers feel it’s unprofessional to swear at work, 56% of executives and managers in this demographic admit to swearing at work.
Some people are so vehemently against profanity in the workplace that they’ve integrated a “no swearing” policy into their workplace. Hancock Concrete is one such company, which has a clear “no swearing, no jerks” sign once you walk in.
While ultimately, swearing as a business owner is a personal choice, one area where it does pose some issues is in advertising. Recently, advertisers on a website called Mumsnet raised concerns that their ads were appearing next to threads with profanity, and YouTube recently came under scrutiny for demonetizing videos that contain profanity.
Thurber has also had to contend with this difficulty in her Facebook advertisements. Facebook has a strict policy against profanity in her ads. “We all have our brand personas and our audience that we’re promoting to. If you’re promoting a platform where people can be authentic and share and to connect everyone, but being forced to do it on Facebook’s terms, it defeats the purpose because that takes away from the freedom of sharing and the conversation building and the authenticity around that.”
Facebook’s ad policy likely stems from its placement of ads on third-party sites; some of the sites would likely take issue with content containing profanity the same way that advertisers took issue with the profanity in Mumsnet’s threads.
In the age of influencer marketing, where captions increasingly matter as much as the photo, developing a strong personal brand is the key to success. Thurber’s built a successful business doing just that — her use profanity alienates anyone who wouldn’t like the way that she interacts with clients and customers, but it draws in people who like her raw and unfiltered attitude.
While it opens her up to critiques and can limit her expression when it comes to paid advertising, it’s also helped propel the organic growth of her message. Thurber’s brand does exactly what a successful personal brand should do: polarize those who aren’t aligned with her message, challenge the norms on what’s considered “professional” and attract individuals to her who share her worldview.
