You Don’t Need A Personal Brand. You Need A Value Engine

Personal Brands Are All The Rage...But Most Of Them Won't Survive

Have you been on LinkedIn lately?

I make an effort not to login that often. But I checked my feed today, and it’s honestly become even more of an unrecognizable cesspool.

Seriously. No one can even make a cup of coffee or complete some other mundane action without writing a LinkedIn post about how it relates to their business or some random aspect of their career.

I mean…

And you know, it’s not just LinkedIn.

Everyone seems obsessed with building a personal brand these days.

The perfectly curated Instagram feed. The viral tweets. The cool headshots with fake-deep quotes underneath. Every founder/CEO starting to post more personal insights and takes, all in the name of “building in public.”

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: Personal branding without a value engine is just vanity marketing.

And if you’re trying to build something that lasts—income, impact, optionality—you don’t need a personal brand.

You need a value engine.

Let’s talk about how to actually build one!

Personal Brands Are Cool - But They’re Being Abused

Let me start out by saying that I think personal brands have a time and a place. And people like Gary Vee, Tony Robbins, Tim Ferriss, Alex Hormozi and plenty of others have printed cash and built really cool things along the way, partly be leveraging their personal brands.

But personal brands are also being abused, and consumers are catching on.

For starters, people are slowly but surely getting tired of in-your-face influencer marketing or people trying to sell them stuff all the time. This includes entrepreneurs leveraging a personal brand to try and be the soul and face of their businesses.

Now sure, influencer marketing can still have great ROI. But increasingly, it’s micro-influencers generating the best returns for brands, not the massive influencers who shill just about anything.

Overall, I think consumers are growing more tired of everything being turned into a commercial.

And on top of that, for many businesses, a lot of personal branding initiatives just don’t move the needle that much.

Likes and comments on your latest LinkedIn post…Retweets on Twitter…Podcast appearances…

Sure, some of this attention on your personal brand can convert into leads or sales. But this only happens if the underlying systems and the engine running your business are sound.

Additionally, I think there are two factors that are going to cause a lot of lackluster personal brands to get wiped out in the near future.

Gen Z & AI Couldn’t Care Less About Personal Brands - Both Prioritize Value Instead

The Atlantic published a really good piece on this. So did Tim Denning. But the gist is that a lot of people want to be anonymous online and don’t buy into this whole personal branding thing. There’s also a growing number of people who see through all the noise and can detect what’s authentic and what’s fake.

People don’t want to be sold snake oil anymore. And they don’t necessarily care if their personal values align with the brand they’re buying from, they just want to buy something that actually works (plus, brands and influencers endlessly bringing values, politics, and personal beliefs into what they’re selling is exhausting society…Like seriously, you sell a B2B service or workout programs, I don’t care who you voted for just give me something good.)

Ultimately, there are more people who are purely value and results driven and really don’t care who, or what, gets them the result they’re looking for.

Just check out how search trends are changing.

Google’s search market share just dropped below 90% for the first time since 2015.

Consumers are searching with tools like ChatGPT instead of Google. They don’t care about where they get their information from anymore. They just demand maximum value, speed, and efficiency. And your recipe eBook that starts out with 15 pages sharing your life story? It’s not cutting it anymore.

I mean, look at what Perplexity and PayPal have announced - you can make purchases directly from Perplexity results. We’re moving towards a future where AI Agents handle shopping for people, book travel plans, and move even more towards a value-driven decision making process. Do you think these AI-powered decisions will care about personal brands? I’m not so sure.

Now I’m a blogger who had his website nuked by the Helpful Content Update and AI. Seriously. A website that made me $500,000+ in 2023 that got absolutely hammered in 2024.

I was pretty upset for a while. I even begrudgingly didn’t use tools like ChatGPT for a while because of what it took from me.

But again it just goes to show - my YouTube channel with 100,000+ subscribers, the blog and brand I spent years building - it didn’t really save my business when the going got tough and algorithm changes obliterated my traffic.

Why Building A Value Engine Is A Better Goal + Some Examples

I think personal brands can be awesome. But I think building one can also be a trap for a lot of creators and entrepreneurs. Again - vanity metrics that make you think you’re making progress, when you’re really not.

Instead, people would be better off focusing on creating a value engine: a repeatable system that delivers consistent, tangible, and scalable value to a specific audience.

In other words - what are the mechanisms you can implement for your business that deliver consistent value to your audience to get them in the door? What pain points can you help solve to attract more clients and deals?

Here are some examples you can also scale up with SOPs and AI/automation:

• Blog content that solves specific problems

• YouTube tutorials for your niche

• Newsletter funnels

• Paid ad funnels

• Livestream Q&As

• Social media automation

• Content repurposing

This is how the value engine flywheel works. You create something that solves a specific problem for your niche or delivers some kind of value. This gets you attention and positive word of mouth. You then get more results and customers. You then scale and continue creating even more value as you improve your products/services/offering.

Positive word of mouth is a big one here. Or you know, being nice to people, developing a good reputation, and delivering on what you say you’ll deliver on. Consistently being good to your customers, in short.

The endless likes on your Instagram morning routine? Less impactful, I’d argue.

So if you’re spending a lot of time trying to build a personal brand right now and your business isn’t really growing, I think it’s time for some reflection.

Do your customers want to see another day-in-the-life video, or hear more about your backstory or personal beliefs?

Or, do they want efficient service, good results, reasonable prices, and as much value as possible?

I’d argue people increasingly want the latter.

You can certainly try to be the face of your business if you want. And some people pull this off very well.

But the underlying mechanisms have to work. You have to deliver value and results. Endless Instagram likes and new podcast appearances won’t help your business if there’s no real substance.

My Personal Plan & Moving Forward

I’ve thought about personal brands a lot over the last year or two.

On the one hand, I write on forums like Medium and now Substack under my name. My YouTube channel is also called Tom Blake. Same goes for all my freelance writing work. I’ve even gotten advice that I should lean into all of this and start selling some kind of course.

But I’ve never really cultivated a personal brand, and I don’t want to start.

I’d rather keep on creating content that helps solve problems. It could be long-form YouTube reviews, random Substack tangents, my SEO-affiliate content, or whatever else I decide to cook up. Ultimately, I don’t care if I’m creating revenue under my name or some anonymous blog as long as metrics are moving in the right direction.

I’m pretty happy with this decision. And I think that most of my focus this year will be on increasing content production and quality, especially on the video side of things. We’ll see how it plays out reach and income-wise.

Now, I still don’t think personal brands are dead or are going extinct. But I do think that AI and changing trends are going to put the squeeze on a lot of personal brand focused businesses that aren’t measuring up behind the scenes.

Of course, there will always be people who want to buy from someone they feel like they know and trust. And some people need to shop from brands that have the same political/religious/ethical beliefs as them. Some people shop hyper-local. You get the idea.

But consumers are also smartening up. They don’t like being lied to or mislead. And they’re generally less brand loyal than they used to be. So, my suggestion to my fellow creators is to focus on delivering as much value as possible and to worry a bit less about growing your Instagram or LinkedIn followers.

I’m curious what you think about the future of personal brands, so let me know! This is also my second post on Substack. I don’t know what I’m doing here yet, but I’m having fun, so I guess that’s something.

Catch you in the next one!