The Rise & Shift of the Personal Brand Economy

On a scale from one to throw-your-phone-out-the-window: how tired are you of hearing the words “personal brand?”

It’s OK, you won’t offend me (someone who uses that term a lot on social media).

Some people building personal brands call themselves content creators. Others still have 9-to-5s but post regularly on LinkedIn, adding “career educator” or “thought leader” to their bios (again, hi).

And whether they’re pushing a product, pitching themselves, or publishing hot takes, it’s clear that we’re deep in the era of what I’d call the Personal Brand Economy.

If you’ve felt the pull, curiosity, or pressure to post more, show more, say more… you’re not alone. I’ve contributed to it, too.

It’s hard not to, when our timelines are full of viral career advice threads, screenshot carousels, and “how I went from corporate burnout to 6 figures online” stories. On the surface, it’s just content, but it’s serving a much bigger purpose for the creators: career currency.

And at its best, it’s also connection, opportunity, and creative freedom.

But lately, I’ve been wondering: where is this all going?

Build-a-Brand, by the Numbers:

• 77% of consumers are more likely to buy from a brand when the founder is active on social media (Entrepreneur).

• 82% of people say they’re more likely to trust a company whose leadership shows up online with a personal brand (Edelman).

• “Creator economy” jobs now total over 50 million globally—and that includes part-time creators, side hustlers, and yes, that LinkedIn thought leader monetizing their posts (Goldman Sachs).

Even on platforms once reserved for job hunting and sharing résumés (activities that have been historically done behind closed doors), the rules are changing. LinkedIn saw a 22% increase in content creation in 2023, and career creators now regularly out-perform traditional posts from corporate brand pages in both reach and engagement.

In other words: we have a new type of career currency.

How did we get here?

• Era 1: The Influencer Industrial Complex. Circa 2013–2018. YouTube beauty hauls. Perfectly curated IG feeds. Influencing becomes a full-time job (and a punchline). Brands accounts are still overly-sanitized and almost never feature any glimpse at the humans behind the brands.
  

• Era 2: The Rise of the Corporate Creator. Around 2019–2021. LinkedIn goes from static profiles to active news feeds. Twitter threads from ex-bankers. Content becomes educational, instructive, “real.” We see that there’s space online for creators who still have jobs, whose whole careers are not just “influencing.”
  

• Era 3: The Gold Rush. Mid-pandemic through 2023. TikTok moves from music and dance to how-tos, hot takes, and a veritable search engine for information. A wave of 9–5 professionals quit to “go all in on content.” Online course launches. Substack gold rush. The seductive promise: if you build a strong enough personal brand, you’ll never have to work for anyone else again.
  

• Era 4: The Multihyphenates. Welcome to now. Quietly, some of those creators are going back to full-time jobs (I did in 2023, but it didn’t last). Not because they “failed,” but because they got tired. Lonely. Burned out. Or maybe they just wanted health insurance again! Corporate and creator identities blend together with blurry lines of demarcation.

We’re at a moment now where we’re all wise to the upside of establishing a personal brand, but the structure and sustainability of maintaining one is less clear. 

Identity, visibility, and perceived control

The most alluring parts about personal branding is feeling like you own something your boss can’t touch and the illusion of control in a chaotic economy. 

You may not be able to control layoffs, leadership changes, or shifting industry tides. But you can control what you post. You can become known for something outside your 9-5. You can be a “brand” in a world that often flattens you into a job title.

But here’s where it gets tricky: when your livelihood, your self-worth, and your digital footprint all blur into one, your identity becomes entangled with your output (@hubs.life, anyone?).

I’ve felt it myself. When a post flops, I don’t just wonder what I could have done better to please the dark lords of the algorithm. I wonder if I’m falling behind, uninteresting, or still too quiet in a world that rewards loudness.

Behind the rise of the Personal Brand Economy is a deeper truth: most of us just want to feel safe.

A strong personal brand can feel like career insurance. An additional income stream from the content you post can create a safety net. A digital catalog of your thought leadership can signal to future employers, collaborators, or clients that we’re worth betting on.

But it can also become a pressure cooker: to always be growing, to stay ahead of arbitrary algo changes, to feel like you need to fix your “low reach” when it’s all made up anyway, to “build in public”, and to always be “on” or have something to say.

Which brings me to something Katie Gatti Tassin (aka Money with Katie) revealed in her new book Rich Girl Nation: 

When Morning Brew acquired her brand (newsletter, podcast, digital IP) in 2022, Katie was actually “acquihired.” Morning Brew bought the rights to her brand— which meant more capital, visibility, opportunity—  and hired Katie as a Morning Brew employee (or contractor, I’m not exactly sure) to still be the face and brain of the brand, working 40-hr weeks.

That introduces a new path within the Personal Brand Economy: leverage and stability. Ownership and structure. Not automatically quitting your job, but using your brand to shape how you work on your terms.

And it’s available to those who are still just personal-brand-curious:

Your personal brand could help you negotiate a promotion, attract consulting offers, or become the go-to mentor in your niche. It might open doors to panels, partnerships, or new roles you didn’t even know existed. So it’s less of a career pivot and more like turning the volume up on your professional identity.

In this context, a personal brand can be a means to an end again, whereas it’s been seen as the end goal this whole time.

So… who actually “wins” in the future of the Personal Brand Economy?

I don’t believe it’s necessarily the people with the biggest followings or slickest funnels.

I believe it’s the ones who use their brand as a tool, not a performance. The ones who use visibility as leverage, not as their only source of worth (or wealth).

Not a mass exodus from corporate, but a recalibration of career currency

Takes the pressure off of getting it all right, right now, doesn’t it?

I’m curious: How are you navigating the personal brand economy? Are you leaning into it? Resisting it? Redefining your relationship to it? 

Reply to this email or leave a comment!

Looking for a more practical guide on starting your own personal brand? I laid it all out here.

A thoughtful personal-branding question comes from Drew over on LinkedIn:

I’d get extremely clear on what I actually wanted my content to do:

Do I want my content to convert into sales (clients, customers, revenue)?
Or into reach (followers, engagement, visibility, brand deals)?

A lot of people jump into personal branding thinking they need to be everywhere, say everything, and grow as fast as possible (I did, too). 

But I wish I’d known sooner: not all growth is the kind of growth that’s right for me. And not all visibility leads to the kind of outcomes I care about.

Both “personal brand business models” are valid, but they require very different content strategies.

• If you’re aiming for sales, you don’t need to go viral. You need to be specific, clear, consistent, and talk to one ideal type of buyer, not the algorithm. Think: tutorials, transformation stories, behind-the-scenes of your work, content that builds trust with your ideal client.
  

• If you’re aiming for reach, you’ll need to prioritize discoverability, emotional resonance, and attention. Think: hot takes, relatable POVs, content that makes strangers stop scrolling and say “omg same.”

I personally shifted my goal from sales to reach last spring, and it wasn’t like flipping a switch. It takes time, and I (annoyingly) spent some time resenting the time I’d “wasted” using my content to sell my career coaching rather than building a big following.

But, I’m glad I know how to sell online if I decide I want or need to again. And if I could do it all over again, I’d start by choosing a primary goal and building backwards from there.

Love the newsletter but want more? Did you know I put together an entire course called Pivot with Purpose? Think of it like a supercharged version of all the best content from this newsletter, tailored to help you nail your career goals.