You have seen this post. You may, in a weaker moment, have written it.

I was rejected from 47 jobs.

Then I rejected fear.

This morning, at 4.45am, after my ice bath, my four-year-old asked me why the sky is blue.

That’s when I finally understood enterprise sales.

Agree?

It has 11,000 reactions. Three people in your office have shared it. One of them called it raw.

This is what most people picture when they hear the phrase, and it is why the phrase makes them want to leave the room. So before we mock it properly, let us agree what we are mocking.

Personal branding is the deliberate shaping of your professional reputation: deciding what you want to be known for, proving it with work people can see, and repeating it consistently enough that the right people think of you first.

Notice that the definition contains no ice baths.

How did we get here?

Blame a management writer and a magazine. In its August/September 1997 issue, Fast Company ran Tom Peters’ essay “The Brand Called You”, which urged readers to think of themselves as the chief executive of a company of one. It appeared before social media existed, when the most aggressive self-promotion tool available to most people was a business card with a slightly bolder font.

The idea has aged better than most 1990s predictions. Careers have become more portable, more freelance and less loyal in both directions, and a reputation that travels with you is worth more than one that stays behind in your old employer’s org chart.

Then the internet handed everyone a printing press with a little red notification dot attached. The company of one acquired the tools of a media company of one. And the posts began.

A field guide to the feed

Spend a week on LinkedIn with a notebook and you will see the same species again and again.

The Parable Merchant. Every taxi driver, barista and toddler is a leadership coach in disguise. The lesson arrives in the final line, which is one word long. Usually “Resilience.”

The Humble Announcer. Is humbled. Is honoured. Is thrilled to share. Is, on closer inspection, not humble at all.

The Dawn Patrol. Up at 4.45, has run ten kilometres and closed a funding round before you have found your other sock. Needs you to know.

The Carousel Artist. Ten slides, five words a slide. Slide ten asks you to follow for more.

The Scheduled Contrarian. Networking is dead. The CV is dead. Hustle culture is dead. Posted every Tuesday at nine, when the algorithm is said to be hungriest.

Laugh, by all means. Then notice what every species has in common. Each one makes a claim and offers no evidence.

That is the whole problem. It is also, as it turns out, the whole solution.

Why does personal branding feel so cringe?

Because, done badly, it turns a person into a product and then makes them do the sales calls.

Ask a room of engineers or designers what they dislike about the term and you hear the same objections. It drags the ethics of advertising into ordinary professional life. It rewards people who perform expertise over people who have it. And curating yourself online is unpaid work that never finishes.

There is also a fair point about who gets rewarded for visibility, since the same confident post lands differently depending on the gender, race and culture of the person writing it.

All true. And yet.

The cringe is not a flaw in you. It is a detector, and it is working perfectly. It goes off when the ratio of claim to proof tips too far.

A post announcing that you are a thought leader sets it off. A post explaining exactly how you rescued a failing project, with the numbers and the mistakes, does not, although both are technically self-promotion.

So this is where I stop joking. Mostly.

What does a personal brand actually consist of?

Start with a distinction. Everyone has a reputation; not everyone has a brand. Your reputation is what people already say about you.

A brand is what happens when you take responsibility for that, decide what it should be, and do the work that earns it. You can opt out of branding. You cannot opt out of reputation.

The useful version rests on four things: a point of view, proof, consistency and conduct. The first is where most people go wrong, because they choose a job title instead.

Marie Kondo did not become famous as an “organising expert”, a label thousands could claim. She started her tidying consultancy at 19, while still a university student in Tokyo, and eventually boiled her method down to a single test: keep only what sparks joy. Her book appeared in Japan in 2011 and in English in 2014, and a Netflix series followed on New Year’s Day 2019. One arguable idea with her name on it.

One arguable idea with her name on it: Marie Kondo’s method reached Netflix in 2019.

In early 2023, after the birth of her third child, she said she had relaxed her own tidying to make room for family. It sounded like a confession. The brand barely flinched, because a philosophy of choosing what matters survives a messy kitchen. Arguably, it is proved by one.

Min-Liang Tan left legal practice in Singapore to co-found Razer in 2005, a company whose line is “For Gamers. By Gamers.” His personal brand is that line made flesh: a gamer running a company for gamers.

Razer’s "For Gamers. By Gamers." line, with its founder as living proof.

When Razer listed in Hong Kong in 2017, he became Singapore’s youngest self-made billionaire at 40, and some fans have tattooed his name on themselves, a level of loyalty no marketing director would dare put in a plan. When the person and the point of view are the same thing, the brand is very hard to copy.

Proof beats posting

Ferran Adrià never had a content calendar. He joined the kitchen at elBulli, on the Costa Brava, as a 22-year-old line cook in 1984 and was running it within about eighteen months.

In time the restaurant opened only from roughly June to December; the other half of the year Adrià spent in a Barcelona workshop inventing what came next. It was named the best restaurant in the world a record five times. His reputation travelled through the people who ate there and the books that documented the work.

Strive Masiyiwa’s proof was costlier. When Zimbabwe’s government refused him a licence to run a mobile network, he fought for five years through the courts, nearly bankrupting himself, until the Constitutional Court ruled in his favour and ended the state’s monopoly. Econet connected its first subscriber in 1998. Nobody has ever needed a slogan to tell them he is persistent.

Most of us will not reinvent cooking or break a monopoly. We do not need to. Proof can be small.

A case study with honest numbers. A talk. A tool you built. A client willing to say your name in a room you are not in.

Picture a quantity surveyor in Jurong East who writes one clear post a month on why renovation quotes go wrong, with real line items and the mistakes she has seen. No hooks, no slogans. Two years later she is the name homeowners forward to each other and contractors quietly respect. That is a personal brand.

Do you have to post every day?

No. Consistency is measured in years, not in posting streaks.

Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, uploaded his first YouTube video in 2012, aged 13. He then spent years, by his own account obsessively, studying why some videos spread and others die. The breakthrough came in January 2017 with a video of him counting to 100,000, which took around 40 hours to film. In 2024 his channel became the most subscribed on YouTube.

The lesson people take from him is “make more content”. The better lesson is that he studied his craft for longer than most people persist with anything.

A footnote, too: scale magnifies conduct. In September 2024, five former contestants sued him, Amazon and the production companies, alleging harassment and unsafe conditions on his competition series Beast Games. The bigger the brand, the closer people look at how it treats those around it.

People who have written online for years tell the same story. The narrow, practical posts are the ones that brought job offers and, more often, grateful emails from strangers. A few good pieces a year beat a daily quota, and the quota is usually what makes people give up.

Your brand is how you behave on a bad day

Martha Stewart started a catering business in her basement in 1976, published her first book, Entertaining, in 1982 and took her company public in 1999. In 2004 she was convicted of obstruction and lying to investigators over a share sale, and served five months in a federal prison camp, leaving in March 2005.

Within the year she was back on television. Later came a friendship with Snoop Dogg and, at 81, a turn as the oldest cover model in the history of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue.

The case concerned a share sale, not her competence, and she rebuilt by going back to work. Personal brands with substance can survive a bad chapter. Those built on persona alone rarely do.

Jack Ma’s persona was part of Alibaba’s story for two decades: the former English lecturer who liked to tell audiences he had been turned down for 31 jobs, including one at KFC, and who co-founded Alibaba in Hangzhou in 1999.

In the autumn of 2020 he gave a speech criticising China’s regulators and state banks. On 3 November the Shanghai Stock Exchange halted the listing of Ant Group, and Ma did not appear in public again until January 2021.

None of this means you should stop having opinions. A personal brand without a point of view is just a headshot. But when your name and your company’s are fused, your words carry the company’s risk, so decide in advance which opinions are worth it.

A method for people who hate the word

If you would rather be known than famous, this is the whole method.

1. Write the sentence you want said about you when you leave the room. Make it specific enough to disagree with. “Great communicator” fails. “The person who can explain carbon accounting to a CFO in ten minutes” passes.
2. Collect proof before you broadcast. Case studies, results, work samples, things a sceptic could check.
3. Pick a rhythm you could keep for five years. Monthly is fine. Quarterly is fine. Sporadic genius is not.
4. Be narrowly useful. Practical beats profound until you have earned profound.
5. Let other people say it. Ask for testimonials and introductions, because a brand lives in what others repeat.
6. Check your offline conduct. How you treat juniors, suppliers and the person who refills the coffee is your brand too, and people compare notes.

Before you press Post

Is personal branding just self-promotion?
No. Self-promotion is telling people you are good; personal branding means deciding what you stand for and showing evidence of it consistently, so that other people say it for you.

How long does it take to build a personal brand?
Expect years rather than months. A clear point of view and steady proof can change how a niche sees you within a year, but reputation compounds slowly and depends on consistency.

Should a founder’s personal brand be separate from the company brand?
They will overlap whatever you do, so align them deliberately and agree which topics you will speak on in public. The closer they are, the more your personal conduct and opinions carry company risk.

And if your company’s online presence needs the same treatment, less claim and more proof, Firefish’s digital branding team can help, no ice bath required.