Via FriendFeed, Daniel Lemire offers a suggestion on “branding”:
Stop saying you are “John from school X”. Say that you are “John who works on problem Y”. Don’t rely on your employer to carry your message!
Of course, this is only the second of the three possible options. You could also be “the guy who works on Problem Y at school X.” This is pretty much the state of play for my thesis advisor, who never had any trouble remembering problems or institutions, but often forgot names. He could describe a person’s whole scientific career– worked on this problem at this school, then moved to that school and worked on this other problem– but not remember their name.
As somebody who is bad with names (the first week or two of a new class is always an ordeal for me), I think it would be great if academia as a whole were to adopt this system.