How to build and sustain authority as a personal brand

In September 2025, Luca de Meo left Renault to become CEO of Kering, the Paris-based group that owns Gucci, Saint Laurent and Balenciaga. The appointment raised eyebrows in the luxury world. De Meo had spent thirty years in the automotive industry, turning around Fiat, building Audi's marketing identity, creating Cupra at SEAT and restructuring Renault. He knew little, by his own admission, about the codes and rhythms of high fashion. Yet Kering chose him for his demonstrated capacity to revive iconic brands and companies in difficult conditions.

What actually travels

Authority is the recognition a public grants to a person whose judgement they trust in a specific territory. It is field-specific and it takes time to build. Also, it is earned through sustained contribution, normally over a considerable length of time. What's most important: authority is not the result of purely rational evaluation. Publics do not verify credentials each time they defer to an authority figure. They use mental shortcuts and are shaped by biases that determine whose judgement feels worth following.

Because the mechanisms through which a public grants recognition happen mostly below the line of rational thought, driven by emotions and social dynamics, they can be understood and shaped deliberately.

Pierre Bourdieu identified a mechanism that helps influence the judgement of a public. Symbolic capital is the accumulated recognition that gives a person the right to speak with weight in a specific territory, built through sustained contribution and converted into standing that a public comes to rely on. De Meo had built that capital across three decades.

Building symbolic capital

Yuval Noah Harari and Brené Brown illustrate how symbolic capital is constructed deliberately.

Harari's foundation was his position as a professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which established academic legitimacy within a specific community and generated the sustained attention of peers who found his work worth following.

The moment that converted that standing into public authority at scale was the endorsement of Sapiens by Bill Gates, which reached a global audience that would never have found him through academic channels.

Brown's foundation was her research on vulnerability and shame at the University of Houston, and her amplification moment was her 2010 TED Talk.

The same sequence happened in both cases. A credible base earns the right to be heard within a specific community. An amplification moment makes that standing visible to a wider public. Neither works without the other, and the sequence matters: the base must come first, because amplification without standing produces attention that evaporates.

Joseph Henrich's research on prestige-biased transmission explains why: prestige commands attention and sustained proximity, and it is that sustained proximity that allows symbolic capital to accumulate in the first place.

When authority crosses a boundary

The field-specificity of symbolic capital is what makes extension into a new territory a genuine challenge. De Meo understood this and acknowledged it publicly. In interviews he explained that he was acting with confidence in the areas he already dominated, such as cost restructuring and organisation, while adopting a learner's attitude in the areas specific to the luxury world.

The same dynamic applies to the senior professional who moves from a corporate career to an independent consulting practice. The symbolic capital built inside an institution is real, but it was recognised by a specific public in a specific context. Moving to a new territory means presenting that capital to people who did not witness how it was built. The transition requires a deliberate reframing of accumulated experience as transferable expertise directed at the tensions and needs of a new public. Without that work, the standing remains invisible to the people it needs to reach.

I went through a version of this myself when I left Nissan to build my consulting practice. For a while, being the ex-Nissan person opened doors and generated attention in a new context. But it did not take long to realise that the symbolic capital accumulated inside a large automotive company was only partially legible to the clients and publics I was now addressing. I had to add a new layer, translating what I had learned into a language that was relevant to their territory and their tensions.

Keeping authority alive

Authority, once established, requires active maintenance. Symbolic capital depreciates if it is not renewed through continued contribution, and the question is what form that contribution should take.

The most durable authority figures are those who stay attuned to the tensions their public is living through: the contradictions between what exists and what people wish existed, the anxieties that a changing context produces, the questions that a professional community cannot yet answer with confidence. Harari has sustained his authority by continuing to address the tension between technological acceleration and the human capacity to govern its consequences. Brown has sustained hers by staying inside the lived experience of vulnerability, shame and resilience that her public recognises as their own.

Roland Barthes used the concept of modern myth to identify the shared narratives through which a community makes sense of its situation. Myths are the frames through which a public reads its own experience, the figures and formulations that feel natural and self-evident to the people who hold them. Working with the myths that resonate with a public's live tensions is a way symbolic capital can be effectively renewed.

Harari built his symbolic capital as a historian capable of reading the deep patterns of human history to illuminate possible futures, first with Sapiens and then with Homo Deus. He now draws on that accumulated standing to warn of dystopian scenarios linked to the unregulated use of artificial intelligence, a territory his public accepts him to speak on because his authority was built on exactly that capacity. Brown accumulated her symbolic capital through academic research and the TED Talk that made vulnerability a legitimate leadership concept. She continues to draw on and add to it by staying inside that same territory, deepening and extending the figure of the leader who finds strength through self-acceptance rather than performance.

The personal brand that sustains authority over time is the one that works within those frames, speaks to those tensions, and offers value that lands because it was built for the specific world its public inhabits.