The future of branding your product is personal branding

Mark Schaefer
4 min readFeb 8, 2024

Beginning with my book KNOWN, I’ve been a relentless advocate for the critical importance of personal branding. Although there are still some skeptics, it’s hard to believe that there is even a debate about this issue any more.

Not only is personal branding crucial for an individual’s long-term success, increasingly it is going to determine whether your company succeeds in this world. I’ll make my case for that today.

You must be known

I recently read an excellent summary of the business case for the personal brand by the talented young writer Nicholas Cole. He wrote:

If you don’t have a personal brand online, people aren’t going to work with you.

Do you know how every single conversation I have with people in business goes? Like this.

“Hey Cole, yeah so I was looking you up online. Really impressive stuff.

Actually, I was reading one of your articles, which got me thinking…”.

Every single time. Without fail.

We are in a transition period in business.

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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!