Every few weeks, someone asks me what’s next.
What comes after podcasts. What comes after social media. What comes after AI. And lately: what comes after personal branding.
Last week it was a founder. He’d noticed that everyone is talking about personal brand now – how to build one on social, how it supposedly buys you money and freedom – and he wanted to know what happens when that wave goes out.
Here’s where I’ve landed.
Not every founder should be the face of the company
I used to say every founder should be a marketing channel.
You know the founder marketing pitch. Open Linkedin and there’s a founder telling you why you need what their business sells.
I was wrong about that.
Which is fine. After twenty years in marketing, if you’ve never changed your mind, you’re probably too stubborn to notice you can still be wrong.
There are businesses where putting the founder in front of a camera does nothing for the marketing. There are founders who build remarkable things and who you’d damage by demanding one video a week from them. And there are industries where trust moves from the company to the person, not the other way around.
What I don’t take back is this:
Every founder should do everything in their power to make sure their people and their customers know the business exists – and care that it does.
That doesn’t have to mean a personal brand. It can mean a customer called a month after delivery. A team with something worth repeating. A product worth talking about. An event. The way you handle a complaint.
So what comes after personal branding?
After a coaching session with a founder in a very narrow industry we came somehow to this discussion – what comes after personal brand? Is there something that people can align with?
Halfway through, something clicked.
His products were perfectly clear. To him. But to his market – not at all.
It wasn’t a copywriting problem. It wasn’t a product clarity problem. It wasn’t even a positioning problem.
It was the foundation the products sat on. There was nothing to say about them that wasn’t positioning, branding, or marketing.
So we built him an ownable idea. One he could repeat without getting tired of it. One he could organize everything he says publicly around. One he could become known for in his own corner of the market. Repeatable, memorable, and strong enough that he’d still believe it a year from now.
Afterwards I kept coming back to it. Maybe that’s the actual answer to “what comes after personal branding.”
An ownable idea.
A personal brand makes you known. An idea can be carried by your team, by your customers, and by people who have never heard of you.
So before you ask whether you should be on camera more, ask yourself what idea you’d be repeating if you were.
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