The Art of Personal Branding (Is Not What You Think)

The truth is that a personal brand is a wonderful side effect, not an objective.

It’s all about your personal brand, right?

Ask someone about the value of attracting an online audience, and they’ll tell you it’s about building a personal brand. 

In fact, I recently received an email from marketing professor Scott Galloway with the subject line, “People are the new brands.”

Turns out Galloway’s 25-year-old apprentice Ed Elson was guest posting, and he revealed the sort of discovery young people often make… meaning something that’s older than they are.

I had to chuckle a bit.

That’s because the term “personal brand” dates back to a 1997 issue of Fast Company magazine that I recall vividly, as I read it just before making the leap away from the big law firm job. 

The cover story was “The Brand Called You” by Tom Peters, which proclaimed that in the new economy, you needed to be a brand unto yourself. In fact, the piece offered just one real takeaway: be distinctive.

That makes sense because Peters borrowed the idea from Chapter 23 (“Positioning Yourself and Your Career”) from the 1981 book Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, by Al Ries and Jack Trout.

Yes, the 28-year-old term “personal branding” was a simple reframing of someone else’s even older idea. Just in case you didn’t know that thought leaders such as Tom Peters did such things, remember: 

The messenger is the message.

And how does one build a personal brand? Self-promotion, naturally. That’s what good marketing is all about, right?

Nope. 

The problem with “self-promotion” is right there in the two words. A focus on the “self” may be human nature, but great marketers and Leading Experts overcome their base nature to serve others as a way to achieve their goals. And “promotion” is a small subset of the psychological discipline of marketing, even as some consider discounts and coupon codes the only marketing they need.

But the biggest problem with the concept of self-promotion is that it places the cart before the horse. The truth is that a personal brand is a wonderful side effect of having an engaged audience. And an engaged audience is the result of marketing that focuses your efforts on their needs, rather than “achieving” a personal brand as your primary objective. 

The other flaw in this line of thinking is that you can “build” a personal brand in a way that’s separate from the people you hope to influence. Whatever brand you have can only exist in relation to other people, and it will only work with some people and not others.

Regardless of objective reality, you’re only “authentic” if the audience thinks you are. They also determine if you’re credible or not. And the psychological influence of authority exists only in the perception of the audience, regardless of your actual level of expertise.

That means your personal brand exists only in the minds of others, just as your reputation is what others say about you when you’re not in the room. And that means what you provide to others matters most.

It’s All About Values

A primary recurring theme of the Leading Expert Way is that connecting with your ideal prospect is about reflecting shared values, an essential component of identity. Therefore, it’s crucial to understand your own values if you want to communicate authentically and in a way that the prospect perceives as genuine.

It’s helpful to think of values in two broad initial categories. As with motivation, these two categories are intrinsic and extrinsic. Research suggests that prioritizing intrinsic values leads to greater well-being and personal satisfaction. 

Citizens of the United States, however, lead the world in embracing extrinsic values. People at the extrinsic end of the spectrum are more attracted to prestige, status, image, fame, power, and wealth. They are strongly motivated by the prospect of individual reward and praise.

So now you understand the appeal of the Kardashian family. Upon their rise to prominence over 17 years ago, they were labeled as being “famous for being famous” thanks to the notoriety and wealth of patriarch Robert Kardashian (part of O.J.’s legal “Dream Team”).

These days, the Kardashian women are successful businesspeople. They leveraged their socioeconomic status back in the day to build an audience, and then utilized that audience to launch successful products.

That’s why a small segment of the population seems not only to tolerate self-promotion, they crave it. But it’s still about fulfilling the need that those individuals have to admire the extrinsic quality of high socioeconomic status. 

Now, there are equally lucrative markets that respond strongly to intrinsic values. And although consumer behavior research says the majority of American consumers appear to be predominantly driven by extrinsic values, they paradoxically don’t prefer overt displays of status.

In other words, we want status, but we tend to frown on marketing that overamplifies the status of the messenger. Note the recent emergence of "stealth wealth" or "quiet luxury," a trend where wealthy individuals choose understated, high-quality items that don't flaunt brand names or scream “money” to the general public, but are instantly recognizable to those "in the know."

Many brands now market extrinsic products using intrinsic language. They sell status items by emphasizing "authenticity," "self-expression," or "values alignment." Welcome to the crazy world of human beings and their purchasing behavior.