What People Get Wrong About "Personal Brand"

Tomorrow CMO is, for now, me. Like, me me.

It isn’t the final form of this site or this content, but as the wheels have gotten fine-tuned and road-tested for what’s next and what it’ll become, it ultimately is a “personal brand.”

And yeah… I know what that implies. I know what “personal brand” does to give us all the ick. It’s become one of those phrases that immediately loses credibility the second it’s used, mostly because of how it’s interpreted.

Scroll LinkedIn for five minutes and you’ll see what people think it means:

• post more!

• be consistent!

• have a point of view!

• build an audience!

None of that is wrong. It’s just not the thing.

It’s the common approach, unfortunately… the way most people approach the building of a “personal brand” is through activity (like those pesky activity-first marketers you hear me shake my fists to the heavens over).

More posts, visibility, and output. As if brand is something you create through volume.

It isn’t. Brand isn’t what you publish, it’s what people remember.That distinction matters more than it seems, because you can be highly active while being completely forgettable.

You can show up every day, share ideas, comment, engage… and still leave no real impression beyond “they sure do post a lot.”

What actually creates a personal brand is much quieter; it’s pattern recognition over time. It’s the accumulation of:

• how you think

• what you notice

• what you consistently return to

• how you frame problems

Not one post-it-and-forget-it. Doing so repeatedly so you start to associate people with something specific. Not because they told you or you told them in your oh-so-pretty branded red-white-and-blue and it-is-NOT-the-BBC-logo posts… but because the world has seen it enough times that it sticks.

Posting every day or weekly doesn’t engender fond memory, but providing a point-of-view where you seem to frame the things others miss in ways that explains how you think about the universe (in this case, B2B leadership and marketing)? That’s a brand. And it doesn’t require scale.

It doesn’t even require a massive audience. It just requires coherence, and a dash of consistency.

When I:

• show up in conversation

• post a field note or a role profile or a carousel or an Operator File or or or

• join a call

• write something longer

... I work hard to make sure it all feels like it came from me (which, granted, it does). I make sure that’s my voice you hear, in every indelibly charming and effusively humble way.

That’s how a brand starts to form. That’s a good shift from “I need to build a brand and have people maybe even wear a t-shirt with that sweet logo on it” to “It’s important to me to make my thinking recognizable.” Once that happens, something else changes… I’m no longer competing on visibility or trying to stand out, or even just chasing attention. I’m working to become familiar and when that’s familiar then that becomes trust.

Trust that gets placed in you somewhere in all those mental maps out there. Not because of one post, but repeated exposure to how one thinks.

That’s personal brand.

Not performance. Not output. Not even volume. Just… recognition, built over time.