What if everything you’ve been told about personal branding is backwards?
In this episode of The Unified Brand Podcast, Chris is joined by marketing strategist, bestselling author and founder of Marketing Simplified, Vanessa Errecarte, to explore why the strongest personal brands aren’t built through constant self-promotion — they’re built by being useful.
Vanessa shares her service-first approach to personal branding and explains how founders, marketers and professionals can turn their knowledge and experience into distinctive thought leadership that people actually remember.
You’ll discover how to develop a counterintuitive point of view, why being different matters more than simply being visible, and how Vanessa’s TRUTH framework can help you transform expertise into memorable content.
Chris and Vanessa also explore how AI is changing online discovery, why distinctive ideas could become increasingly important in AI-powered search, and why imperfect, human content can often create more trust than highly polished content.
In this episode:
- Why personal branding isn’t really about you • How to find your distinctive, counterintuitive point of view • Vanessa’s TRUTH framework for developing thought leadership • Why memorability should come before growth • The biggest personal branding mistakes professionals make • How to test ideas before doubling down on them • Why consistency matters more than constantly creating content • How AI is changing search and online visibility • Why imperfection can actually strengthen trust • How to turn expertise into speaking and career opportunities • The thinking behind Vanessa’s book, Valuable & Visible
If you want to build a personal brand that creates credibility and opportunities without becoming an influencer or constantly talking about yourself, this episode is for you.
CONNECT WITH VANESSA ERRECARTE
Website: https://vanessaerrecarte.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vanessa-errecarte
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vanessaerrecarte/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/vanessa.errecarte/
Marketing Simplified: https://marketingsimplified.com/
GET THE BOOK
Valuable & Visible: Redefining Personal Branding by Leading with Impact Over Image
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Valuable-Visible-Redefining-Personal-Branding/dp/1394395000
How to Build a Personal Brand as a Thought Leader — Without Becoming an Influencer
If you want to build a personal brand as a thought leader, don’t start by asking what you should post on LinkedIn. Start by deciding who you can help, what problem you understand particularly well and what you believe about that problem that other people aren’t saying.
That’s the strategic foundation.
Because a strong personal brand isn’t built by talking about yourself more often. It’s built by becoming associated with ideas that are useful to other people.
It’s a subject I recently explored with marketing strategist, bestselling author and Valuable and Visible author Vanessa Errecarte on the Unified Brand Podcast. Vanessa teaches corporate branding, digital marketing and personal branding at UC Davis Graduate School of Management, and her approach challenges much of the conventional wisdom around building a personal brand.
As she put it:
“What if your personal brand’s not about you? What if it is about the customer and sharing knowledge with an audience that you can help?”
That distinction changes everything.
For founders, CEOs and senior leaders who instinctively recoil when someone tells them they need to “work on their personal brand”, it’s also rather liberating.
You don’t have to become an influencer.
You don’t have to turn your private life into content.
And you certainly don’t need to spend every waking hour feeding the LinkedIn algorithm.
You need to become useful, distinctive and memorable.
Here’s how.
What is a personal brand?
A personal brand is the set of associations people hold about you: what they believe you know, what you stand for, which problems they associate with you and the perspective they expect you to bring.
Thought leadership gives those associations intellectual substance by demonstrating your expertise through useful, distinctive ideas.
That’s an important distinction because much of the advice around personal branding starts too late.
People jump immediately to expression:
Post three times a week.
Make more videos.
Tell more personal stories.
Comment on other people’s posts.
Build your following.
But activity isn’t strategy.
The same mistake happens in corporate brand building. A business decides it needs a stronger brand and immediately starts talking about a new website, identity, campaign or content strategy.
But what exactly is all that activity supposed to communicate?
At Elements, one of our guiding principles is that strategy must precede expression. We believe a brand is the operating system of a business rather than simply a marketing asset.
The same principle applies to your personal brand.
Before deciding how to express it, clarify what you’re actually trying to express.
Personal branding vs thought leadership: what’s the difference?
Personal branding and thought leadership overlap, but they aren’t the same thing.
A useful way to think about the distinction is this:
| Personal branding | Thought leadership |
| Helps people understand who you are | Helps people understand how you think |
| Builds recognition | Builds intellectual authority |
| Communicates expertise and values | Demonstrates expertise through useful ideas |
| Makes you more memorable | Gives people ideas worth remembering |
| Creates visibility | Gives that visibility substance |
You need elements of both.
A recognisable personal brand without any meaningful thinking behind it can become superficial. Equally, you can have extraordinary expertise, but if nobody can associate that expertise with you, its reach and commercial value remain limited.
Vanessa describes the goal in terms of memorability:
“When you teach someone a new point of view, and then they try something a different way and it actually helps them, then they remember you.”
And that’s the part that often gets missed.
She continued:
“When you remember something, that’s when you can repeat something and refer something.”
That is brand building in a nutshell.
Recognition is useful.
Being remembered for something useful is much more powerful.
Why most personal branding starts in the wrong place
Suppose a founder came to me tomorrow and said:
“I need to improve my personal brand.”
My first question wouldn’t be:
“What are you posting on LinkedIn?”
I’d be much more interested in:
What do you want people to understand differently because they’ve encountered you?
That moves us away from content production and towards positioning.
And Vanessa makes a similar argument.
“Don’t even think about yourself when you go to think about how you want to appear online.”
Instead, she recommends picturing the person you’re trying to help:
“Picture in front of your face that human being that you think you could really help with something if they saw it in a different way.”
That’s a much stronger starting point than “What should I post today?”
It also changes personal branding from an act of self-promotion into an act of service.
You’re not trying to manufacture an online personality.
You’re asking what you know that could be valuable to somebody else.
Why copying influencers can make you less memorable
Part of the problem is that the most visible examples of personal branding tend to be influencers.
So we naturally copy what we see.
We announce achievements. We post photographs. We share milestones. We tell everyone we’re “delighted to announce” something.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of that.
But it doesn’t necessarily make you memorable.
Vanessa describes seeing LinkedIn posts such as:
“I’m really excited to tell you that I just got this certification. I’m so honoured that I will be speaking at this event.”
Her response isn’t that those posts should disappear entirely.
It’s simpler:
“It’s just that I don’t remember that.”
And that’s the problem.
We can invest enormous amounts of time and emotional energy in being visible while remaining strategically invisible.
Vanessa puts it rather neatly:
“We are exhausted as the human because we feel like we’re putting ourselves out there and doing a lot of work, and we are remaining invisible, and no one’s teaching us how to be memorable.”
The question therefore isn’t simply how do I get seen?
It’s what will I be remembered for once I’ve been seen?
Start with the problem you want to help people solve
Here’s a simple exercise for founders developing their thought leadership.
Ask yourself:
- Who do I understand particularly well?
- What problem do they repeatedly struggle with?
- What have I learned about that problem that could genuinely help them?
- What do I believe about it that differs from conventional wisdom?
- What can somebody do differently after hearing my perspective?
Notice what’s missing.
There isn’t a question asking how impressive you are.
Your credentials matter. Experience matters. Evidence matters.
But those things support your authority; they don’t have to become the subject of everything you publish.
Think instead about the people whose thinking you actively seek out.
Usually, you’ve built an association between that person and a particular problem.
When this happens, you want their perspective.
That’s a powerful brand association.
Develop a distinctive point of view
This is where my conversation with Vanessa became particularly interesting.
She talks about developing a counterintuitive point of view — something that creates what she calls a “wait, what?” moment.
This isn’t contrarianism for clicks.
You don’t have to declare that everything your industry believes is wrong.
Instead, you’re identifying where accepted wisdom is incomplete.
Vanessa explains:
“You need to be able to signal that you understand what everyone understands, but then give that counterintuitive point of view.”
That’s a subtle but important distinction.
You’re demonstrating that you understand the established view before showing people something they might have missed.
That’s where your experience becomes valuable.
After ten, fifteen or twenty years in an industry, you’ve probably seen patterns other people haven’t.
You’ve watched customers make the same mistakes.
You’ve seen accepted “best practice” fail under certain conditions.
You’ve found questions nobody asks early enough.
Those observations are the raw material of thought leadership.
Use Vanessa Errecarte’s TRUTH Framework to find your point of view
Vanessa has turned this process into a framework she calls TRUTH.
It’s particularly useful for founders because it takes the rather vague instruction to “have a point of view” and turns it into something practical.
T — Tropes
Start with what everybody already thinks.
What’s the conventional wisdom in your industry?
What’s the phrase that gets repeated so often nobody questions it anymore?
This establishes the world as it currently exists.
R — Real problem
Now ask what’s being overlooked.
Where does the conventional answer break down?
What happens when somebody follows the accepted wisdom but still doesn’t get the result they need?
U — Understanding
What’s a better way to understand the problem?
This is where your own interpretation starts to emerge.
You’re not merely saying everybody else is wrong. You’re giving people a more useful lens through which to see the issue.
T — Tested reasoning
Now prove it.
What evidence supports your position?
That could be research, customer results, lived experience, case studies or repeated observations from your work.
Without evidence, counterintuitive thinking can easily become empty contrarianism.
H — How to act
Finally, give somebody something to do.
Vanessa sees this as a crucial part of the framework:
“What’s one thing you can leave people with that they can try and realise that what you said really is a better way?”
Because when somebody applies your idea and gets a result, something changes.
They don’t simply consume your content.
They experience the value of your thinking.
As Vanessa puts it:
“They’ve done something and it’s helped their life… and now they trust us and they remember us and repeat us and refer us.”
That’s a far more meaningful definition of personal brand growth than follower count.
Turn your expertise into intellectual property
Most experienced founders know considerably more than they’ve documented.
Years of decisions, mistakes, conversations, experiments, and observations create ways of seeing the market that someone entering it today simply doesn’t possess. However, experience trapped inside your head doesn’t create much external value unless you give it structure.
One way to do that is by creating frameworks.
Vanessa said something during our conversation that I think a lot of people underestimate:
“If you’re trying to teach someone something and you can name some steps in a sophisticated way, you elevate your knowledge.”
That’s exactly what she’s done with TRUTH, and it’s something we’ve done at Elements with our own Unified Brand Framework™: Clarify → Unify → Amplify.
Clarify who the organisation is, who it serves, and why it matters. Unify the business around that strategic understanding, then Amplify it consistently through experience, communication, and growth.
The framework isn’t valuable simply because the words are memorable. It makes a philosophy usable and gives people a practical way to apply it.
Look for the same potential within your own expertise. What processes do you repeat? What questions do you always ask? What mistakes do you regularly diagnose? What stages do clients pass through, and what do you find yourself explaining again and again?
There may be intellectual property hiding in plain sight.
How to create a thought leadership post on LinkedIn
Once you’ve done the strategic work, content creation gets considerably easier.
Vanessa suggests starting simply — even with one thought leadership post a week — rather than creating an unsustainable content machine.
Her basic approach starts with a short story before moving towards the distinctive idea.
She explains:
“The first part is a sentence or two story lead-in.”
Then comes:
“The second part is a segue into the ‘wait, what?’ moment.”
From there, you teach the idea through a framework and give the reader a practical next step.
Translated into a repeatable structure, that gives you:
Story → tension → “wait, what?” insight → framework → evidence → action
Imagine, for example, a prospect tells you they’re spending more on marketing than ever but getting less back.
The obvious conclusion is:
“We need better marketing.”
But your experience tells you the real problem is strategic confusion. The company can’t articulate why customers should choose it, so every new campaign simply amplifies the same ambiguity.
That’s your “wait, what?” moment:
Your marketing problem might not be a marketing problem.
Now explain why.
Show the evidence.
Give readers a way to diagnose it.
You’ve stopped merely producing content.
You’re teaching.
Your personal experience is part of the differentiation
There’s another advantage individual thought leaders have over corporate brands: you’re already human.
Your experiences give your ideas context.
Vanessa explains that in corporate branding we’re often trying to add founder stories and other human elements to make an organisation relatable. An individual already has those experiences, observations and client outcomes available.
As she puts it:
“As a human, you either have your own experiences or your observations, client experiences, outcomes, etc. that you can naturally pair on that to get that natural storytelling in it.”
That doesn’t mean every post needs to become a deeply personal confession.
The story exists to illuminate the idea.
Your life isn’t the product.
Your experience is evidence.
That’s a much healthier — and usually much more interesting — way to approach authenticity.
Consistency matters more than becoming a content machine
The second major personal branding mistake Vanessa identifies is giving up too quickly.
People post enthusiastically for two or three weeks, see little immediate return and stop.
But brands don’t work like performance ads.
Associations take time to form.
Vanessa describes personal branding as:
“A long game.”
And recommends giving it time:
“If we’re gonna do the memorable things, the things that actually work over time, you have to be patient up front.”
That aligns closely with one of our principles at Elements: consistency compounds. Long-term brand value is created through repeated, aligned actions over time.
You don’t necessarily need more ideas.
You need stronger ownership of your best ones.
One good idea can become a LinkedIn post, article, podcast conversation, keynote, sales conversation, newsletter and video.
Repetition isn’t the enemy.
Randomness is often the bigger problem.
How should a founder’s personal brand relate to the company brand?
This is where I’d add an Elements perspective to Vanessa’s thinking.
Your personal brand and your business brand shouldn’t become strangers.
They don’t need to be identical. In fact, they probably shouldn’t be.
But they should share strategic DNA.
If your organisation stands for one thing while your public thought leadership continually pulls attention somewhere else, you’re effectively building two disconnected brands.
I’d apply our Unified Brand Framework™ here.
Clarify
What do you believe?
What does your company believe?
Where is the meaningful overlap?
Unify
Connect your expertise, founder story, company positioning and the problems your customers care about.
You don’t need a corporate script.
You need coherence.
Amplify
Only then turn those ideas into posts, podcasts, articles, talks, videos and conversations.
This is where personal brand visibility can start building commercial brand value too.
Amplification without clarity creates more noise.
Can AI help you develop thought leadership?
Yes — but not by outsourcing the thinking.
One of Vanessa’s most interesting suggestions was to use AI as a thinking partner rather than an answer machine.
When developing a counterintuitive hook, she recommends pushing it far beyond the obvious suggestions:
“Tell me 40 different things, 40 different hooks for it.”
Why 40?
Because the first few responses are likely to be obvious.
As Vanessa explains:
“If you tell it three, it’s gonna tell you some common things people say.”
By asking for far more possibilities, you’re using the technology for exploration rather than handing over authorship.
Her wider principle is excellent:
“Great market research tool, but we never ask it questions, we ask it for answers.”
That distinction matters.
Use AI to challenge your assumptions.
Ask it for alternative explanations.
Ask what objections somebody might have.
Explore 40 hooks instead of three.
But then apply human judgement, expertise and experience.
AI can widen the field.
You decide what’s true.
Why distinctive thinking matters for SEO and AEO
There’s an interesting consequence of all this for search.
AI has made competent, generic information extraordinarily cheap to produce.
That makes generic information less differentiating.
Vanessa argues that distinctive perspectives have an advantage because they’re harder to collapse into the same patterns as everybody else.
Her formulation is:
“Authority is your credential. Expertise is that counterintuition, that ability to just see things in another way.”
I’d be cautious about making definitive claims about exactly how any individual AI search system ranks or cites content; those systems evolve continuously.
But the broader content principle is sound.
If twenty articles give essentially the same answer, there’s very little reason for yours to be remembered.
Original frameworks, credible first-hand experience, specific evidence, clearly expressed definitions and distinctive arguments give both humans and answer engines something more useful to extract and reference.
That’s also why our Elements SEO/AEO approach calls for direct answers, question-led headings, self-contained definitions, structured frameworks and original expertise rather than generic commentary.
SEO shouldn’t mean becoming more like everybody else.
Good SEO helps people discover you.
Good brand strategy gives them a reason to remember you once they do.
The goal of personal branding isn’t visibility. It’s useful memorability.
This is probably the biggest idea I took from my conversation with Vanessa Errecarte.
Visibility by itself isn’t a strategy.
There’s limited commercial value in being seen by thousands of people if none of them knows what to associate you with.
And there’s even less value in creating an online personality you’re eventually exhausted trying to maintain.
Instead:
Know who you want to help.
Understand the problem.
Find the perspective your experience has given you.
Challenge accepted wisdom when there’s a genuine reason to.
Turn your expertise into frameworks people can use.
Give them something practical to do.
Then keep showing up consistently enough for the association to form.
Vanessa summarised the principle beautifully during our conversation:
“Personal branding is not about you, it’s really about who you serve.”
That’s the shift.
Not:
Look at me.
But:
Here’s something I’ve learned that might help you.
Do that consistently and something interesting happens.
People start remembering your ideas.
Then they start associating those ideas with you.
Eventually, when the problem you talk about becomes their problem, you’re one of the people they think of.
That’s when a personal brand starts becoming commercially powerful.
And it’s why the strongest thought leaders don’t simply make themselves more visible.
They make themselves more valuable.
If you’re exploring how your own leadership profile connects with the brand you’re building around the business, our Strategic Shifts guide is a useful place to continue that thinking.
You can also take the Brand Power Assessment to understand where clarity, differentiation and alignment may currently be limiting the strength of your brand.
And if your founder story, company positioning and wider brand no longer feel like one coherent system, book a Discovery Call with Elements. As a Unified Brand Agency, we’ll help you clarify what’s really going on before you invest more time and money amplifying it.
Frequently asked questions about personal branding and thought leadership
How do you build a personal brand as a thought leader?
Start by identifying the audience you can help, the problem you understand deeply and the distinctive perspective your experience gives you. Turn that thinking into useful frameworks and content, support it with evidence, and communicate it consistently. Positioning should come before posting.
What is the difference between personal branding and thought leadership?
Personal branding shapes what people associate with you professionally. Thought leadership demonstrates how you think by sharing useful ideas, expertise and distinctive perspectives. Personal branding creates recognition; thought leadership gives that recognition intellectual substance.
What makes someone a thought leader?
A thought leader doesn’t simply repeat established knowledge. They help an audience understand an important problem differently and provide credible reasoning, evidence or frameworks that make their perspective useful. Expertise becomes thought leadership when other people can understand, apply and ultimately associate those ideas with you.
How often should you post on LinkedIn to build a personal brand?
There’s no universal posting frequency. Vanessa Errecarte recommends beginning simply, including the option of one thoughtful LinkedIn post each week. The important principle is sustainability: consistent, useful ideas over time are more valuable than a burst of frequent content followed by silence.
Should a founder’s personal brand match their company brand?
Not exactly, but the two should be strategically aligned. A founder can express personal experiences, opinions and stories that wouldn’t belong in corporate communications, while still reinforcing the company’s wider positioning, purpose and expertise. The aim is coherence rather than identical messaging.
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