The problem with personal branding

Why your name should mean something your work can prove, and how to uncover the living argument underneath everything you create

Your personal brand is what your work proves about you.

Words by me, design by @maia benaim

There was a small wooden office in the entrance hall of a hotel on the Blackpool promenade where, throughout most of my childhood, on every check-in and check-out day, my brother and sister and I would stand on tiptoes at the window and “help” my Nan run that hotel of about eighty rooms.

She owned the place (literally and figuratively). She also painted it, end to end, a couple of rooms at a time, in between everything else. She sewed the curtains herself, on a sewing machine she kept in the apartment underneath the hotel, in floral fabrics she chose by holding the bolts up to the window light to see how they would behave in a north-facing bedroom in November (she was, on this point, militant).

She cooked breakfast, lunch and dinner for over a hundred guests a day. She was the in-house cabaret singer (yes, I’m serious), which meant she was also responsible for that night’s entertainment, every single night, throughout the season, in a town that judged its cabaret seriously enough to ruin a person, and would not have stood for any nonsense.

She did most of this often while looking after the four of us, which is to say while occasionally peeling a small grandchild off an ankle with one hand and signing in a coach party of fourteen Yorkshiremen in with the other.

Once, when I was perhaps seven, I watched her negotiate a refund with a furious Glaswegian husband who had arrived expecting a sea view and gotten a brick wall, while I sat on the floor of the office, building a fort out of plastic, brightly coloured keyrings. The exchange went the way these exchanges tended to go for her, which is that he ended up apologising, and booking again for the following August, and if I remember correctly, asking her to please pass on his regards to Jean from the bar.

She did not have a marketing strategy. She did not have a content calendar. She did not have a brand. She had no concept of what a brand was, and if you had attempted to explain it to her, she would have looked at you with the precise expression she reserved for guests who turned up at six in the evening and inquired whether dinner could be “a bit fancier tonight”. Which was, to be entirely clear, absolutely fucking not, good sir.

What my Nan had instead was a hotel that was indistinguishable from who she was. The carpets, the curtains, the cabaret, the casseroles, the children running around the office on changeover day, the occasional (and I mean occasional), very well-placed “fuck” or “bollocks” — they were not branding. They were her. The guests who came back every August for thirty years did not come back because of a campaign.

They came back because the woman who had told them, in the lounge on a Saturday evening in 1987, about her sister-in-law’s terrible second husband, was still there in 1989, and 1992, and 1996, and 2001, with the same wry mouth and the same instinct for which side of the bed you preferred, and the same willingness to, at eleven at night, sing Simply The Best in a sequinned dress while you finished your Schwepps lemonade and vodka.

Some of them came back for thirty Augusts. Some of them sent her Christmas cards from Aberdeen until she died, some even asked her to sign things for them. One man, I am told, drove down from Inverness for her funeral, which is not the kind of thing people do for a hotel on the Blackpool promenade. She was in newspapers and holiday guides. She was the walking definition of the hotel’s personal brand. Except she wasn’t actually trying to do anything other than bring her whole heart to her work and give her people what they wanted. She didn’t even want the money. She wore the same black pants and t-shirts like a uniform. She hated spending money on herself. My grandpa would ask where she might like to travel or go on holidays and she’d often say… “let’s just go for a drive” because she never wanted to go too far. She loved that place, her work was her life.

I don’t think the lesson here is that you should become inseparable from your business until you are personally responsible for every curtain, casserole, checkout complaint and late-night rendition of Tina Turner. My Nan worked hard in a way that I would now describe as medically inadvisable, and possibly illegal if prescribed by a business coach, or your boss.

The Personal Brand isn’t about becoming the brand. Which, I think, we have tried to do for many years.

But the lesson here is actually: the work was carrying a recognisable, unrepeatable standard, which people flocked to without great marketing effort, and that gave her something that brought her fulfilment, creative expression and peace in her professional and personal life, after many years of hard struggle in her younger years.

She could sing what she wanted. She made the rules. She made people happy. She could slip her grandkids £20 notes when nobody was looking, buy us the world’s best fish and chips, and plastic crap from the corner shop. That was enough for her.

Her taste was in the curtains. Her humour was in the way she handled complaints. Her memory was in the beds people preferred, the guests who needed extra toast, the coach parties who would arrive half 3 hours early and act surprised that time still existed in Blackpool. Her standards were in her refusal to let anyone else paint the rooms or make any design choices and she absolutely never took any shit. Her voice was in the lounge at night, but also in the way the place was run in the morning. Her name meant something because the experience had taught people what to expect from her. People came to that hotel, without a shadow of a doubt, because of her.

That is the part modern “personal branding” keeps trying to imitate from the outside.

It sees the loyalty, the familiarity, the repeat business, the intimacy, the recognition, the sense that people were returning to a person as much as a place, and decides the answer must be: show more of yourself.

But the “self” was never the point.

The work was the point. The self gave the work its unique shape. That is a very different thing.

We have started talking about marketing as though it is a pretence of personhood. Be more authentic. Share more. Let people in. Tell the story. Be more vulnerable. Show the mess. Build connection. Make strangers feel close to you… so they will trust you enough to buy.

(but that last bit is always implied)

Which sounds fine, until you realise how quickly it can become a person standing in the middle of the internet, holding up pieces of her private life like little trust receipts just because someone told her that’s how her business could be respected, before she announces that “personal branding is dead” because it didn’t work for her the way she was promised it would. And therein lies the problem. We boxed up “personal” and expected it to work for each new individual. When the very point is that what’s yours can’t be boxed.

A great personal brand is not built just by proving you are human. Everyone is human. Devastating news for several people on LinkedIn, but true. A personal brand is what your work says about you when you are not in the room to explain it.

“Personal branding” as a terminology, even, is the greasy, slightly cursed modern label for something much older, deeper and more consequential: reputation, body of work, public trust, recognisable standards, a unique approach, use of language that could only be yours, a name that means something.

(this happens to be exactly what we build inside Sweet Talk, btw).

Because it wasn’t just someone’s Nan in Blackpool. This is the standard people have been trying to replicate for centuries. Joan Didion was not a personal brand. She was a woman who wrote with the cold-blue precision of a swimming pool at six in the morning, year after year, until her name meant a kind of mental clarity nobody else in American letters had on offer. Nora Ephron was not building a brand when she wrote about feeling bad about her neck — she was reporting accurately, in a voice that had been hers since she was a kid, on what it was like to be a brilliant woman over fifty. Frida Kahlo did not have a content calendar. She had pain, paint, dresses she chose like arguments, eyebrows like punctuation, and a body of work so unmistakably hers that a hundred years later you could identify one of her self-portraits from a fast-moving train. David Bowie reinvented himself on every album and remained, somehow, never not-Bowie, because he was building a recognisable mind even while the costumes kept changing. Julia Child wrote about Sole Meunière in a way that made it clear she had eaten it once, in Rouen, in 1948, and her entire life had reorganised itself around that fish. Vivienne Westwood put a safety pin through a queen and built a forty-year career on the principle that a dress could be a political opinion. Anthony Bourdain spent a decade writing about line cooks and ended up trusted by an entire culture, even beyond his tragic death (which the entire world felt), because he was paying attention to the people the rest of the food industry treated as background. The list is, quite literally, endless. Emily Brontë, Claude Hopkins, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, David Ogilvy, Bukowski, Hemingway, Bernbach, Plath, Schwartz, Wilde, Halbert, Sontag, Caples, Morrison, Burnett, Nabokov, Atwood, Orwell (I don’t even have to use their first names).

None of them were trying to be personal brands. They were trying to make excellent work and refusing to compromise about what excellent meant. The brand, and the commercial success, was the accumulation of that refusal, over years, in the people who watched.

And that’s literally the point. A personal brand is simply the standard people associate with your name. The feeling they expect when they encounter your writing or thinking or ideas out in the wild. The kind of thinking or voice or world they come to you for. The way your offers are delivered. The arguments you keep making. The details you refuse to let slide. The proof, taste, usefulness, care, rigour, humour, depth, and point of view that accumulate until your name begins to mean something specific. Because the work kept proving something interesting, even if, on the surface, it was just bed and board on the blustering seafront in the North West of England.

The problem with personal branding is the phrase itself. It makes an ancient human phenomenon sound like something invented by a man in a podcast studio who wants you to optimise your morning routine and maximise your profit.

You may have heard, lately, that personal branding is dead. People have been saying this every couple of years for the 15 years I’ve been writing for personal brands. I don’t think it’s dead, I don’t think it could possibly ever die. I think the thing most people have been calling personal branding for the last decade has always been confused about what it was: a content output, a curated personhood, a performance of human-ness in service of monetised attention, and the version that is dying is the version that was always confused. It is dying because nobody trusts it any more, which is, in fact, the immune system working as intended. What is not dying, though, what is, if anything, becoming considerably more valuable, is the actual thing personal branding was always trying to imitate from a distance, badly: the body of work that proves, over years, what a name means.

A personal brand built on a body of work that is actually proving something is one of the greatest inheritances and surest future-proofs of a creative career. A personal brand built without one is a person standing on the internet in a tasteful linen ensemble, hoping the lighting will do the rest. The first compounds. The second exhausts. The first becomes a name that means something over decades. The second becomes a job you cannot put down, a self you cannot stop performing, an audience who came for the entertainment and will leave the moment the entertainment falters.

My Nan did not have a personal brand. She had work that was indistinguishable from her judgment, her taste, her refusals, her humour, the way she was born in Manchester, hadn’t lived there for many years, but had the salt-of-the-earth of it seeping out of her pores, and that recognition followed the work for more than thirty Augusts. You cannot reverse this. You cannot decide to be recognised first and figure out what for later. The world will only finish a sentence you have been writing for a while.

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Behind the paywall, I’m going to give you a framework I use to find the living argument underneath everything you make, sell, write, teach and refuse. I’m covering:

Where personal branding is actually going.

• The four shifts personal, creative marketing is actually making in 2026 — and why what we’ve been taught has been the right idea at the wrong volume, on the wrong layer, for the wrong reasons.

• What kind of detail is now the single hardest thing to fake on the internet, and how to use it without sounding like everyone else trying to.

• The one thing AI is structurally incapable of doing that will protect a real body of work, indefinitely, from being replaced by it.

• Why “niche” was always a lie and why the era of single-keyword positioning is ending, and what is replacing it.

A diagnostic framework.

• How to tell whether your current personal brand is the overflow of a body of work that is actually proving something, or the substitute for one.

• The seven itchy symptoms of a brand pretending what the work has not yet proven, and how to soothe the itch.

• Why catching yourself editing an ordinary Wednesday morning into content is a structural problem rather than a moral one, and what to do about it before it follows you into your kitchen, your friendships and the way you tell a story over dinner.

The five-part writing practice based on a flow I take every new client through, before we touch a single piece of copy.

• How to find your equivalent of Nan’s curtains, the place your touch is non-negotiable, the standard only you would have applied, the decision that recurs every time you make something, even when you can’t justify it.

• How to find your signature handling of friction, tension, contradiction, the thing you refuse, the thing your clients describe to other people when they are explaining why they came to you.

• How to find the specific ways to reach your reader that prove you have not, at any point, flattened them into a buyer persona with eyelashes.

• How to find the standard you will not compromise on, the part of the work you would do even if there was no exchange involved.

• How to find your cabaret. The slightly inadvisable, completely specific-to-you act your loyal audience returns for year after year, that you have been treating until now as a side project to the real work, and that is, in fact, the real work.

Plus, four real client examples of the framework in action in real careers.

• A messaging strategist for multi-faceted creative founders, a grief-literate therapist who writes essays, a multi-disciplinary creative working across several genuinely different practices at once, and a brand strategist working with bigger organisations. So you can see the bones working in someone else’s body of work before you take them into your own.

By the end, you’ll have a clearer sense of what your work is actually saying about you, what you want your name to mean, and what you need to keep writing, building, proving, refusing and repeating until it all becomes the same thing.

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If you are new here, you should know two things:

One, this piece is the fifth in a five-week run of writing I am publishing for my paid subscribers in the lead-up to Sweet Talk opening its doors next month. Think of them like a Sweet Talk preparation kit. Each one works as a mini masterclass in its own right. The first four, on Substack messaging strategy, the best year of my business in the worst year of my life, how to make work that’s interesting and complex but legible, and my flip-reverse on storytelling in marketing, are all live on The Smoking Area now.

Two, Sweet Talk, my four-month (copy)writing mastermind creative business uprising, opens waitlist applications 25.05. Early applicants save significantly off the full price and get access to an extended payment plan not available anywhere else. It always sells out in a few days. I only open it twice a year.

This is exactly the kind of thing we cover in Sweet Talk. Inside, you build a body of work that actually says something. You reject the content-creator mould. You trade trendy noise for timeless ideas. You learn to write in a tone that can hold both poetry and precision and still sell. Join the waitlist for your invite.