Personal Branding Isn’t New, It’s Just PR With A Better Name

The best PR campaigns were never about the product, they were about the person behind it. After twenty years in public relations, that’s the one lesson that took me the longest to fully understand.

Why personal stories outperform brand stories

I spent a large part of my career building and scaling my own London PR agency, working with global names like Amazon, AWS, and Sony Music alongside dozens of scaleups, startups, and individual founders with big ideas.

Looking back across every campaign, the pattern is unmistakable: the campaigns with the biggest impact, the sharpest cut-through, and the longest shelf life were never faceless brand stories, they were personal ones.

Why this matters more now than ever

We’re living in an age where AI can generate almost anything, which makes it harder to know what to trust. In that environment, telling your real story has become one of the most effective marketing tools a business has.

This isn’t a new idea, it’s just never been branded as something as sexy as “personal branding.” It’s always simply been PR. News coverage and credibility markers still matter, but the people behind the brand, and the stories they’re willing to tell, have always driven the deepest impact.

What building a personal brand actually requires

After exiting my agency, I spent six months studying how figures like Alex Hormozi, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Daniel Priestley approach personal brand at scale. The conclusion: most people now understand personal brand has value. Very few know how to actually build one.

It’s not about posting on LinkedIn five times a day. It’s about building real trust and real credibility, and having something genuinely meaningful to say.

At a senior level, that might mean writing a Sunday Times bestselling book, launching a top-ranking podcast, being interviewed by top-tier media, or giving a TED talk. At another level, it might simply mean building a valuable online community, posting consistently, and running a strong email marketing strategy.

The question to ask before you start

There are many levels to this, but the real key to building a personal brand of lasting value is understanding why you’re doing it:

• Are you doing this to build your business?

• Do you want to influence how people think, or change behaviour?

• Do you simply want recognition?

In our Deep Dive personal brand workshops, I ask people this exact question: why do you want to raise your profile? In 99% of cases, the honest answer isn’t ego or glory. It’s because they have something they believe in, an idea, a business, a cause, a change they want to see in the world, and they’ve realised visibility is the price of admission for getting it heard.

Raise the profile, and you raise the thing you’re actually trying to build.

Why Bold Minds Media exists

That thinking is the foundation of Bold Minds Media. We work with genuinely inspirational people, those with great ideas and great products, and help them use their story to inspire others and scale whatever they’re building. Not through a single tactic, but through all of them, working together.

That’s our mantra, and it’s the reason this agency exists.

(Our other mantra: don’t work with dicks.)