You Ask, I Answer: Succeeding Online Without a Personal Brand?

In today's episode, Alexander asks, in your opinion, is it possible to become an expert and succeed online without personal branding? Of course. You don't need to have a personal brand centered around you. A personal brand is nothing more than a brand. So you can have multiple brands, right?

Companies do have many, many brands. Um and not all those are well known. Um services and companies do you know that have strong brands are owned by a portfolio company that you've never heard of? Like here's an example. Have you ever heard of Sun Capital or Golden Geek Capital or Rourke Capital or JB Holding Company or any of these these major company names?

No. I've I've never heard of them until I found this graphic. But we sure do know their portfolio pieces, right? You may not know Sun Capital, but you've probably heard of Friendlies or Boston Market or Johnny Rockets. Uh you may not know Rourke Capital, but you know Arby's and Jamba Juice and uh Auntie Annies.

So this is a a really good example of individual brands that are held by a a parent brand that you never heard of. Right? So do you need a personal brand? No. You can have collectively sub brands of things that you work on, uh projects that you that could be well known, work that could be well known, and not know the person behind it, right?

So can you build uh a blog that's really powerful that is not centered around your name and your personality? Yes, absolutely. Can you do the same with a podcast, a YouTube channel? Absolutely. Can you build a product that does really well and nobody has any idea who's behind it?

Yep. There are so many video games that we know the name of the game. I couldn't tell you who makes it. Couldn't tell you uh anything about the person, the creator, the creative team, none of that. So when we're you're thinking about personal branding, when you're thinking about succeeding online or becoming an expert, um, you don't need to to make it about you.

In fact, it's probably better if you don't make it about you, uh, and more about the benefit that you bring, whether it's your name or the things that you build. Uh in the end, uh audiences want benefit to themselves. Audiences want, you know, faster, better, cheaper, they want to be entertained, they want to be educated to some degree, uh, they want to be engaged. Whether that is done through uh you as a human being or the work that you create is irrelevant to the audience. And it really should be irrelevant to us as marketers.

We should just have something that we're focused on. We pick something that um we're going to be building and we build that thing. One of the advantages of not making something a personal brand, uh, is that it's actually easier to sell it, right? So if you make a blog, let's call it the business success blog, right? That's a lot easier to sell to somebody else than you know, the Christopher S.

Penn blog, right? Because the the latter is a personal brand that isn't really transferable. Right? But the business success blog, you can hand that off to anybody, you know, collect uh your money and and off you go. Um so when you're thinking about your your personal success strategy online, what's the outcome you want?

Right? Do you want to be uh well known as a person? If that's the case, if that's the outcome you're after, then uh no, you can't succeed online without personal branding because in that case, the the success metric is being well known as a personal brand. Um is your success metric, I want to sell this property, I want to you know build this property and flip it like you know, an online realtor. Um in that case, you don't need a personal brand, and it's better that you don't have one.

Uh it's better that you you build the the thing to succeed and then flip the thing. What goals you have will dictate the the path that you choose, and there isn't a right answer. Um there is no one saying you must have a personal brand. Does it help? Yes.

Particularly if you are not in the business of you know building online properties and and and you know selling them off or or marketing them. If you are the average person who is looking for something to help their career, that's a case where a personal brand is is useful and where a product brand is not. Um if you want to be known well enough that you can find that next job without having to spend you know seven months job searching, um then yeah, in those cases a personal brand helps and being known for the thing that you want to be hired for. One of the other things I've seen happen is that people will build a personal brand that is not relevant to what they want to get paid to do, and as a result, uh it's still very hard for them to find a new position, a new uh partnership, things like that. Um, so one of the things you do have to do when you set out for your overall success strategy as a human being is decide what is it you want to be known for?

Uh what is it that you want people to call you about? Um, you know, for myself, if you have questions about data and analytics and marketing and stuff, I want you to to call me about those things. I don't want you to call me about my cooking recipes, right? I may post things on Instagram for you know, like things I've cooked, but that's not what I want to be known for. So I'm not going to devote substantial amounts of um online real estate to those things, even if they may be entertaining, they're not relevant to the core uh uh promise of the brand.

When we talk about brand, the best definition I've ever heard is from uh Zay Frank, the uh the entertainer, who said way back in 2006, a brand is the emotional aftertaste of a series of experiences. That's why he in his uh monologue he jokes that's why you can sell grandma's cookies, but you can't sell old people's cookies, even though they're functionally the same thing. Um they have a very different emotional aftertaste. So in your building of a brand, what is that emotional aftertaste that someone should have after a series of experiences? That's one of the reasons why people tend to gravitate towards personal brands, because it's easy for them to understand the emotional experience that they want to deliver to somebody, and it's intricately tied to who they are as a human being.

But there's absolutely nothing that says that has to be a person, right? Again, think about all those brands. When you hear a brand like you know, Sonic or Red Lobster or uh Auntie Annies, does it conjure up some sort of emotional experience? You know, Taco Bell, uh, does that s does that resonate with you in some way? For some people, yes.

They're gonna have a very strong emotional reaction to that. Um, they they may actually start salivating. For other people, it may conjure a very different emotion, like had a bad experience there. But either way, you're invoking an emotion. So if you're a taking the product branding approach, again, be clear what the emotional experiences that you want people to have and what the emotional aftertaste people should be left with.

If with yourself as a person, what do you want people to feel? And what do you want them to feel when they remember you? Right? When uh when they go for recall. Again, if somebody is thinking about a marketing analytics problem, I want them to recall my name.

Um, and I want them to recall my company's name, right? There's an example of of two parallel brands that are very closely tied together. Um, but if you recall trust insights and you don't recall my name, that's fine. And vice versa. Either way, the brands are gonna work together.

Um so, yes, you can become an expert and succeed online without personal branding, depending on the approach that you're taking and the outcome that you're looking for. Um you cannot succeed at uh you cannot succeed at uh without a personal brand if your goal is to have a personal brand. It's just basic logic. Um, but you absolutely can succeed if you want to be the the wizard behind the curtain, if you will. You have follow up questions on this topic, leave them in the comments below.

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