I had never heard of the term before 2023 (And I’m a marketer).
It’s only when I decided to freelance full-time and was deciding on niching down for a service that I heard of the term “LinkedIn Personal Branding,” and everyone was hooked on it for some reason.
And man, did I need some money, so I started ghostwriting, managing “personal brands”. My only understanding was that since I’m building a person’s brand, it’s personal branding. Easy peasy!
Funny thing with me is, I actually need conviction to sell my services, it’s just this nagging morality inside me, if you will. So I’m writing this to go down the rabbit hole of whether personal branding is a complete scam or if there is any actual truth to this.
The biggest rebrand in marketing history
Because we humans have always liked gossip and attention, some version of personal branding has always existed. Only it wasn’t called so - it was called reputation (wow, heavy word). But the word was neutral - could be used for a brand or a person.
The term personal branding was first used by Tom Peters, a management guru. He argued we all should be CEOs of the company “Me Inc”. The question is, why did he use it?
The mid-90s saw a wave of corporate downsizing. The unspoken "social contract" where you stayed at one company for 40 years in exchange for a pension was dead.
Peters argued that if companies weren't going to be loyal to you, you shouldn't be loyal to them - only to your own work and reputation (which makes so much sense in today’s world).
The origin actually answered a lot of questions. The need to have a personal brand is a direct rebellion from job culture. And if I look at the way things have gone down from the 90s, the hype of having a personal brand only makes sense.
But didn’t people run businesses without a personal brand before?
They absolutely did - but look at how the brands were built earlier - you had to have a logo, sufficient advertising, and have physical presence. That meant having capital and being rich.
Now the entry barrier is zero. You don’t need heavy capital anymore, which means an overflow of brands, marketing, and messaging, and we have no idea who to trust.
Look around you, the layoffs, the toxic culture, the scams, so much so that we as a risk-averse society have all resorted to trusting the people behind because it signals skin in the game.
A personal brand is essentially a public-facing liability. If a founder or a strategist puts their name and face on a service, they are staking their entire social and professional future on its success, which brings trust into the mix. (This links to the reason not every “personal brand” is successful, as I’ll discuss further).
Is it mandatory that I have a personal brand today?
Listen, no one is holding you at gunpoint and asking you to build a personal brand. It’s totally your choice.
In fact, I would reframe the question more as - Can you afford not to have a personal brand in this economy? You can if you have one or more of the following 5 Privileges:
If you have a license or a degree that acts as a legal barrier to entry. Say being a doctor, a lawyer, or a Chartered Accountant.
If you are part of an elite, offline circle, you don't need digital reach. More often than not, the requirement is to have been born into, or already "arrived" in, a particular social class where you’re labelled elite.
If you have enough "fuck you money" (generational wealth, a massive exit, or high savings) to not care about where your next lead comes from for the next 2-3 years.
You solve a very specific problem, and the solution is so scarce, you automatically get word of mouth. For example, the physiotherapist that every sportsperson in your city goes to because she's worked with their injuries for a decade. The electrician who knows every building in your colony because he wired half of them.
If you own a high-demand intellectual property, a patent, or machinery, for example, the formula for Diet Coke, or the only cold storage facility in a 50km radius, or an offline distribution network that took 5 years to build.
Unfortunately, the middle class doesn’t share a lot of these privileges, and it’s therefore crucial you build some form of “personal brand.”
But then why does Personal Branding feel like a scam?
Personal branding has to be the term that makes a lot of people cringe - including me and a lot of peers who are providing services in this niche. I don’t see that happening for other niches, say, paid marketing. Why the difference?
It feels like a scam because, in many ways, the modern "Personal Branding Industry" operates exactly like a sophisticated Multi-Level Marketing scheme.
The biggest reason it feels like a scam is that a huge percentage of the people "winning" at personal branding are branding themselves as experts on personal branding. They teach you how to build a brand... so you can teach others how to build a brand... so they can sell more brand-building courses.
You’re told to be "authentic," but then you’re given a template for how to be authentic - which is why it feels like emotional cosplay.
The "scam" feeling arises when there is a gap between who the person is and who the LinkedIn profile says they are.
Most experts know that there is no sure-shot framework for success. But that doesn't work on social media. So to "build a brand," people are forced to strip away nuance and present complex systems as 3-step frameworks.
But is it a scam? Nope, not by a mile. Here are some studies:
Gorbatov et al. (2019): Personal brands boost employability and satisfaction by 43%, enabling freelancers 20-30% higher rates via expertise differentiation.
Edelman 2025: Peers/employers trusted at 76% vs. brands at 63% - personal voices arbitrage trust gaps paid media can't touch
And anyone who has marketed a company brand vs. a personal brand knows the difference in engagement and conversion that you get as ROI. And it’s way better for personal brands.
So, how do I build a Personal Brand?
cringes internally
Well, if you do cringe, this is not the step you start with. It usually means one of two things: either you don't know what you stand for yet, or you do know, but the templates being sold don't match who you actually are. Here’s an article that might help with it.
Step 1: Do you need a personal brand? If you don’t have the 5 privileges I talked about in the above section, the answer is Yes. The only question to solve is how. I’m assuming you are clear on what to do. Having a mission helps when the days are not in your favour. This will also give you clarity on who you are trying to reach.
Step 2: Goes without saying, don’t stretch yourself thin. Pick the platform where your audiences actually hang out. And actually be on the platform: posting and ghosting are not going to do anything for you. If you’re confused about what to post, start easy: follow your favourite creators in your domain. Start reposting with your own thoughts. After a week or so, you will start getting a lot of content ideas - start there.
Step 3: Stick to it - it only works if you stick to it. Like compounding. If you’re going to quit in six months, don’t start yet. You don't need a ghostwriter, a brand strategist, or a content calendar to start with, especially if you have no clue why you are doing what you’re doing. But you WILL need those to scale faster.
There are many ways of building a personal brand, and I’ll probably have to make a separate article on it. If you want me to write it, please reply to this one.
Wishing you a successful, profitable, and AUTHENTIC personal brand!
Until next time,
- Shrishti