There is a scene that repeats itself every day in almost every team: someone opens their email to ‘take care of two quick things’ and, without realising it, has jumped from a meeting to a chat, from the chat to a call, and from the call to a presentation that ‘needs to be polished before five o’clock’. At the end of the day, the feeling is one of both exhaustion and mental fragmentation.
The data confirms this. A recent report by Microsoft on the ‘infinite workday’ puts it in numbers: a person can be interrupted every two minutes (275 times a day) during core working hours between meetings, emails and chats. When time is broken into pieces, attention ceases to be a resource and becomes a luxury. And that’s where personal branding, properly understood, ceases to be a matter of ‘visibility’ and becomes a much more practical issue: how to build trust in less time, with more clarity and less noise.
Your personal brand is not what you say you are, but the reputation that others build about you. It is formed by the people who read you, who work with you or with whom you share a difficult decision. It is defined in specific moments – when there is pressure, when it is time to prioritise, when choices have to be made – and it is consolidated in places that sometimes go unnoticed: a meeting, an email, a hallway conversation, a presentation or even a publication. It matters because trust is earned through actions and built through consistency. And in an environment where everything competes for attention, that’s what makes people listen to you sooner, understand you better and recommend you more easily.
In this article, in interview format, I share my practical view on personal branding applied to marketing: no smoke and mirrors, just examples and data.
What is personal branding in marketing?
For me, personal branding in marketing is the reputation you build while doing your job… and while explaining how you do it. It’s not ‘talking about yourself’; it’s making your criteria identifiable. It’s someone being able to describe you with a simple, effortless phrase. And when that happens, two things happen: they remember you and they recommend you.
If I had to explain it to my mother, it would be like this:
‘When someone recommends you, they do so with a clear sentence.’
‘Call Ali if you want to bring order to chaos.’
In marketing, we live with a curious tension. On the one hand, we work to make brands clear and consistent; on the other, we often don’t apply that same logic to our professional careers. We change projects, roles or contexts, and we find it difficult to explain, in two sentences, what value we consistently bring. For me, personal branding is precisely that: not what you do, but what you facilitate and what others perceive you to contribute.
And here’s an important clarification: a solid personal brand is not built on self-promotion or on a persona (nor on ‘being everywhere’ and living for likes). It is built on service. That is, on the willingness to share learning, elevate conversations and help others shine too.
Therefore, personal branding emerges when you manage to align both of these things:
- Promise: what people can expect from you (your professional ‘hallmark’).
- Proof: what you have done and how you have done it (evidence, case studies, lessons learned).
- Consistency: between what you think, say and do.
What are the main characteristics of a strong personal brand?
Sometimes you see someone every day and nothing sticks with you. Other times, you read two lines and think, ‘This person knows what they’re talking about.’ That’s why not all visibility equals credibility. In my experience, good, strong personal brands that build trust share five traits (and none of them are posturing):
- Clarity: it’s easy to understand ‘why they would call you.’
- Discernment: you don’t repeat trends; you interpret them and decide what applies and what doesn’t.
- Consistency: you maintain a recognisable thread (themes, tone, values) over time.
- Usefulness: you contribute something actionable: an idea, a question, an example.
- Humanity: you are not a catalogue of achievements, but a person with vision, limits and real learnings.
And this is not just a nice idea, a perception or personal experience. Again, it can also be seen in how the market behaves, and the data supports this reality. In B2B, where marketing and business meet head-on, the 2024 report by Edelman and LinkedIn points out that 73% of decision-makers consider thought leadership to be more reliable for evaluating capabilities than marketing materials or product sheets. And 75% say that thought leadership content led them to research a product or service they weren’t considering.
Simply put, there comes a time when a brochure is no longer enough; what convinces people is how you think. Because if they trust you, they listen to you first; and if they listen to you first, they give you a chance first.
What elements are necessary to build a personal brand?
For me, this is more about routine than genius. Not about a brilliant post, but about a consistent way of communicating that you can maintain, even when you’re tired, short on time, or don’t feel like it. And that routine is based on four pillars.
1) Positioning (your ‘territory’)
Sorry, but no, you can’t be an authority on everything. But you can be recognisable in two or three areas where you have real experience and your own points of view. Example:
- Marketing with a focus on business (not just campaigns).
- Storytelling about products (explaining complex things without boring people).
- Culture and leadership (how to get things done with teams).
2) Narrative (your story, well told)
People don’t remember lists, they remember stories. And in marketing, the narrative is the story that organises your journey, not to embellish it, but to give it meaning.
A good professional narrative usually answers:
- What problem are you obsessed with solving?
- What have you learned through practice?
- What mistakes have changed the way you work?
3) Evidence (your work, in examples)
You can build credibility with lessons learned, decisions and processes (without revealing sensitive information):
- lessons learned from processes (‘how we make decisions’, ‘what I would do differently’),
- frameworks (‘the 3 signs that X is going to fail’),
- everyday examples (‘how I prepare a briefing so that it doesn’t fall apart during execution’).
4) Community (relationships, not numbers)
This is probably the least glamorous and most ‘behind-the-scenes’ part, but it is also the most decisive: generate conversation, i.e. comment positively, recognise others, open debates, contribute without competing and be present.
This is where a very human doubt often arises: ‘What do I have to say?’ My answer is simple: don’t start by talking about what you’ve achieved; start by talking about what you’ve learned. People connect with the result, yes, but they trust the process.
What are the benefits of personal branding?
I like to explain it this way: a well-developed personal brand gives you two very specific advantages.
The first is trust: when someone has read how you think or seen how you work, they come to the conversation with fewer doubts and more willingness to listen to you.
The second is speed: not because things magically go ‘faster’, but because the warm-up time is reduced. Instead of spending half the meeting getting them to understand who you are, what you do, and what your level of judgement is, you get to the important stuff sooner.
In marketing, it shows when you present a proposal: if your reputation precedes you, the conversation starts with ‘how do we do it’ rather than ‘let’s see if this makes sense’. And in business, it shows when decisions have to be made: if your way of prioritising and arguing is recognisable, it is easier to be given space, budget or responsibility. It’s not an unfair shortcut; it’s the result of being consistent and useful long enough for others to know what to expect from you. Again, there is data to back up this idea: in the Edelman and LinkedIn 2024 report, more than 75% of decision-makers say that a piece of thought leadership has led them to research a product or service they were not considering.
We’re not just talking about notoriety; we’re talking about changing someone’s mental map. And that change — in marketing and in business — is the beginning of almost everything.
There is also a less obvious benefit: personal branding makes you a point of reference within your own company. In large companies, your impact grows when other areas quickly understand what you do, why it matters, and how to collaborate with you. It’s a form of ‘silent alignment.’
In addition, there is a less obvious but very relevant effect: personal branding also reinforces internal trust. Edelman, in its report on trust in the workplace, points out that 79% of employees globally say they trust their employer. And in its special report on brand trust, it notes that 80% of people trust the brands they use. When professionals communicate rigorously — explaining what they do, why it matters, and how decisions are made — that trust is not ‘declared’: it is reinforced in practice, because it provides context and credibility where otherwise there would only be corporate messages.
How should personal branding be built?
This is where the block usually lies. There are many ways, but if I had to propose a simple method—one that can be applied even if you have little time—it would be this.
1) Define your promise in one sentence
A sentence that is not grandiose, but useful:
‘I help ______ achieve ______ through ______.’
Example (for guidance):
‘I help marketing teams turn complex innovation into clear stories that drive adoption and reputation.’
It’s a way to force yourself to be specific and avoid the typical fog of ‘I do marketing.’
2) Choose three ‘container’ topics
Three well-chosen themes give you focus, variety, and a framework for organising ideas and experiences. For example:
- Practical marketing lessons (briefings, campaigns, insights).
- Leadership and culture (how we work, how we make decisions, how we conserve energy).
- Innovation explained in human terms (technology explained without technical jargon).
3) Create a ‘story bank’
Don’t wait for inspiration. Save difficult decisions, mistakes, conversations, project lessons learned, analogies you use to explain something to a team or stakeholder. There is material in our daily lives, but we miss it because we don’t record it.
4) Define a ritual (rather than a calendar)
The word ritual sounds like something that is carefully crafted. In my case, for example, I post every week on LinkedIn: same day, same time (Mondays at 8:30 a.m.). Consistency in this case is not rigidity; it is making it easier for your community to find you. And it creates commitment and routine for you.
5) Write to be useful, not to impress
If your content does not help people to think, decide or understand something better, then it will be noise (even if it is well written). If it helps, it becomes a reference, an inspiration… Do not post to impress. Post to be useful, recognisable and reliable.
And if you need a rule of thumb to transform ‘your work’ into ‘content’ without sounding like an advertisement, here is a formula that works very well in marketing and also in business: Problem → Decision → Learning. It’s simple, it’s human and, above all, it’s credible.
6) Measure what matters
Don’t obsess over likes. Look for:
- quality conversations,
- private messages saying ‘it helped me’,
- opportunities that come your way,
- people who recommend you without being asked.
In my case, it works for me to keep a simple track (in an Excel spreadsheet, nothing fancy) to see the metrics in perspective. Not to obsess over the numbers, but to clearly understand the evolution, what content brings me closer to my goals and generates quality conversation, what doesn’t, and why. The key is to turn every post into a learning experience.
What role do new technologies play?
New technologies—and especially AI—are an accelerator, but not a substitute.
They can help you organise, structure, refine clarity, generate versions and think of counterarguments. In other words, they can shape you. What they cannot give you is substance. They cannot manufacture your judgement or your decisions. And that is the risk we are beginning to see: if we all use the same tools in the same way, we end up writing the same.
My rule is this: AI to gain efficiency in execution, i.e. structuring, summarising, versioning, improving clarity. But differentiation still lies in the human element, in accumulated experience, context, decision-making ability and nuance. Because you can have impeccable text and still say nothing. What builds trust is not perfection: it is the presence of experience, intention and point of view.
In the end, personal branding is not decided in an ‘about me’ section. It is decided in something much more everyday: whether, when someone thinks of you, they can explain you in a simple sentence. That sentence — the recommendation sentence — is the most honest proof that your reputation is clear.
The leaders who build lasting personal brands tend to do the same thing, albeit in different styles: they repeat a territory, maintain a voice and turn their experience into something useful.
For example, Simon Sinek turned an intuition into a framework that anyone can remember and apply (‘Start With Why’ and his ‘Golden Circle’), and that clarity explains much of his impact.
Remember that what you need to do to build a personal brand is simpler and more demanding: be consistent in what you contribute. And that, in times of noise, is what makes you easier to understand, easier to remember and, above all, easier to recommend.
