Brand With Ayanda

Imagine Nike opened a hotel.

Not a hotel with a Nike shop in the lobby. A proper Nike hotel. You walk in, check in, go to your room, order something from the minibar, maybe head down to the gym. Nike has never opened a hotel, as far as I know. But if they did, you’d probably have a pretty good idea of what the experience would feel like before you ever stepped through the door.

You could probably picture the space. You might have an idea of how the staff would speak to you, what the rooms would look like, what the gym would be like, even what the packaging would look like if you ordered room service. You wouldn’t need to see a giant Nike swoosh everywhere to know whose hotel you were in.

That’s because a brand is bigger than its visual identity. It’s the pattern underneath it. The collection of experiences, messages, associations and expectations that build up over time. And I think personal branding works in much the same way.

A brand is more than what people see

I used to think branding was mostly about how a business looked. The logo. The colour palette. The fonts. The photography. The little visual details that make everything feel cohesive. And, to be fair, those things do matter. I still love a good visual identity. But I’ve come to realise that they are only one part of the picture.

A brand is also what people come to understand, expect and associate with you. It’s shaped by what you say, what you talk about repeatedly, how you explain things, what you believe, how you interact with people, what you choose to show and, sometimes, what you deliberately choose not to show.

Over time, those things create a pattern. And that pattern is what people recognise.

The same thing happens with a personal brand. Before someone ever hires you, they may already have an impression of you based on the things they’ve seen and heard from you. Maybe they’ve read three of your posts. Maybe they’ve visited your website. Maybe someone mentioned your name to them. Maybe they’ve noticed that you keep talking about a particular problem in your industry. They are quietly putting the pieces together.

The question is whether those pieces are creating a picture you intended.

So, what actually is a personal brand?

There are plenty of definitions of a personal brand floating around. Some focus on reputation. Others focus on visibility or how you market yourself. For me, it comes down to something a little simpler:

A personal brand is the intentional expression of who you are, what you know, and how you see the world — made recognisable through the way you communicate and show up.

There are two words in that definition I care about quite a lot: intentional and expression. Because I think we’ve made personal branding unnecessarily complicated. We’ve also put women in a slightly strange position when it comes to being visible online.

On one side, there’s the pressure to be professional. Polished. Serious. “Credible.” And somewhere along the way, professional can start to mean removing anything that makes you recognisably human. On the other side, there’s the pressure to be authentic. To be vulnerable. To share behind the scenes. To let people into your life. And sometimes that turns into the idea that if you aren’t sharing enough of yourself, you aren’t being authentic. I don’t think either extreme is particularly helpful.

You don’t have to choose between professional and authentic

You can be professional without becoming impersonal. And you can be authentic without making your entire life public. Those two things aren’t opposites, even though social media sometimes makes them feel that way. Professionalism, at its core, has much more to do with how you conduct yourself than whether your brand looks corporate.

You can be warm. You can be playful. You can have strong opinions. You can dress in a way that isn’t traditionally “corporate.” You can let your sense of humour come through in your content. And still be professional. Professionalism can look like knowing your stuff, communicating clearly, respecting people’s time, having good boundaries, delivering what you promised and taking pride in your work.

None of that requires you to become a less interesting version of yourself. Authenticity has a similar problem. Being authentic doesn’t mean giving people unrestricted access to your life. You can tell a story without telling every detail. You can talk about motherhood without documenting your children. You can share something you’ve learned without sharing the most painful version of how you learned it.

You can have a personality without turning your private life into content.

Expression isn’t the same as exposure.

That distinction matters.

Your personal brand isn’t asking you to become more polished or more vulnerable for the sake of being visible. It’s asking you to become more intentional about what you express.

What should your personal brand actually express?

This is where I think we can make personal branding much more useful. Instead of starting with, “What should I post?” or “What colours should I use?”, start with three much more fundamental questions:

• Who are you?
• What do you know?
• How do you see the world?

Those three questions give you somewhere to build from.

1. Who you are

This is your identity. Not your entire personality and certainly not your complete life story. Your brand doesn’t need to contain every interesting thing about you. It’s about understanding the qualities, values, experiences and perspectives that shape the way you work and communicate.

Maybe you’re deeply analytical but also very warm. Maybe you’re direct and practical. Maybe you care about making complicated things easier to understand. Maybe you have a very particular way of looking at your industry because of your background or experience. Those things can influence your brand.

You don’t have to manufacture a “brand personality.” You need to understand the person who is already there.

2. What you know

This is your expertise. It’s the substance behind your brand. You may have years of experience in your field, a particular skill set, a unique process or a body of knowledge that your clients need. But expertise alone doesn’t necessarily make you memorable.

There are plenty of smart people who know what they’re talking about. What starts to differentiate you is the way you interpret what you know. Which brings us to the third question.

3. How you see the world

This is your point of view. It’s what you believe about your industry, your work and the problems you solve.

It’s the difference between saying, “Here are five things you should know about branding,” and saying, “I don’t think your branding problem is actually a branding problem. I think you’ve been trying to design your way out of a positioning problem.” Now there’s something to engage with. You don’t need to be controversial for the sake of having a point of view. You simply need to have one.

Your expertise tells people what you know.

Your perspective tells them how you think.

Together, those things start making you recognisable.

Your personal brand isn’t created in one place

This is where the Nike example comes back in. A personal brand isn’t created by your Instagram feed alone. It’s built across all the places where people encounter you. Your website. Your social media. Your emails. Your photography. The way you describe your work. The subjects you return to. The stories you tell. The opinions you share. The way you speak to clients. The way you present your offers.

Even the things you consistently choose not to talk about can become part of the picture. One post probably doesn’t tell someone much about you. Neither does one photograph or one colour palette. But after twenty, thirty or fifty little interactions, a pattern starts to emerge. That is why consistency matters. Not because you need to post every single day or repeat the same three talking points until everyone is bored.

Consistency is about creating enough coherence that people can begin to recognise the same person behind all those different touchpoints.

This is where identity, story and design come together

For me, personal branding can be thought of through three connected layers: Identity, Story and Design.

Identity is what you’re decoding. Who are you, what do you know, what do you believe and what do you want to be known for?

Story is what you’re narrating. How do you communicate that identity? What experiences, ideas and perspectives give context to what you know?

Design is what you’re elevating. How do you make all of that recognisable visually, so that the way your brand looks supports what you’re trying to communicate?

They aren’t three separate things you tick off and forget about. They build on one another. If you skip identity, your story can feel disconnected. If you don’t understand your story and message, your design can end up looking beautiful but saying very little.

And if the visual identity doesn’t reflect the person and ideas underneath it, the whole thing can feel slightly… off. You know that feeling when something looks good but somehow doesn’t feel right? Usually, there’s a reason.

Your story doesn’t have to be dramatic

I think this deserves its own conversation because personal branding has become quite attached to storytelling. We’re often told that we need a compelling origin story. A struggle. A turning point. A dramatic before-and-after. But your story doesn’t have to be dramatic to be useful. Sometimes it’s simply the collection of experiences that shaped how you think.

Why you chose your career. What you noticed that other people didn’t. The mistake that changed how you approach your work. The client experience that made you rethink something. The belief you’ve developed after years of doing the work. Your story gives people context. It helps them understand why you think the way you do.

And you can share that context without handing over every private detail of your life. Again, intentionality matters.

Your expertise needs a point of view

The same goes for expertise. Knowing a lot isn’t quite the same as being known for something. You might be an excellent designer, coach, consultant, photographer, strategist, lawyer or accountant. But there are probably hundreds or thousands of other people who could describe themselves in exactly the same way.

So what makes your expertise yours? Part of the answer is your perspective. What do you believe about the work you do? What do you approach differently? What do you wish more people understood? What advice in your industry do you disagree with? What have you learned through experience that changed your mind?

Your personal brand gives you somewhere to articulate those things. Not loudly. Not controversially for attention. Just clearly. There is something powerful about being able to say, “This is what I know, and this is how I see it.”

Your visual identity should make the invisible visible

This is also why I don’t think visual branding should be treated as decoration. Your colours, typography, photography, website and visual language are communicating something before someone has read a single paragraph. But they work best when there is already something underneath them to express.

If you’ve clarified your identity, your positioning and your message, design has something to work with. It can make certain qualities more visible. It can create recognition. It can reinforce the feeling you want people to have when they encounter your brand. That’s why I’m less interested in asking, “What colours are trending?”

I’d rather ask, “What does this brand need to communicate before we’ve even said a word?”

The design should have a reason for being there.

Your personal brand is probably already being built

This might be the most useful thing to take away from all of this. You don’t start with a blank page. Even if you’ve never intentionally worked on your personal brand, people probably already associate certain things with you. Maybe you’re the person people go to when they need a particular kind of advice. Maybe your content always makes people think. Maybe you have a very recognisable way of explaining things. Maybe people remember a particular opinion you’ve shared.

That’s a brand beginning to form. The work isn’t necessarily to invent something completely new. It’s to look at what’s already there and ask: Is this the picture I want people to have? And if it isn’t, what needs to become clearer?

A few questions worth sitting with

Before changing your logo, rewriting your bio or completely rebuilding your website, I’d start here:

• What do I want to be known for?
• What do people currently come to me for?
• What parts of myself have I hidden because I thought being professional meant removing them?
• What am I sharing because I genuinely want to, and what am I sharing because I think “authenticity” requires it?
• What do I believe about my industry that I haven’t said clearly yet?
• What parts of my life are mine to keep private?

If someone encountered ten pieces of my content without seeing my name, would they recognise the same person behind them? And perhaps the biggest question: Does the way I currently show up reflect the person, expertise and perspective I actually want to be known for?

You don’t need to become more polished to build a strong personal brand. You don’t need to become more exposed either. You need to become more intentional about what you express. Because a personal brand isn’t about creating a more marketable version of yourself. It’s about making the right parts of who you already are clear enough, consistent enough and recognisable enough that when the right people find you, they know what they’re looking at.

That’s the work. Not becoming someone else. Becoming more deliberate about being seen as yourself.