Five pitfalls of personal branding: When becoming known doesn’t work

Mark Schaefer
7 min readMay 15, 2023

I recently had an exchange with a friend who described a person who seemed to be doing everything right with his personal brand but had no progress with monetization. He wondered why his friend was failing — to the point of quitting. It made me reflect on the pitfalls of personal branding. Under what circumstances will even an excellent personal branding effort fail?

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Mark Schaefer

Keynote speaker, marketing strategy consultant, Rutgers U faculty and author of 10 books including KNOWN, Marketing Rebellion, and Belonging to the Brand!