How your personal brand builds business performance

In her foundational research, marketing scholar Susan Fournier argued that people don’t form relationships with brands the way we once believed. They don’t engage with abstract entities or logos. They form relationships the same way they do with people: through emotion, consistency, memory, and trust. In her words, a brand can become a partner, just like a friend, a mentor, a rival, or a guide.

If you are a one-person business, like a coach, a consultant, a doctor or a lawyer, this logic is easy to grasp: you are the brand. But it’s just as true if you lead an organisation or are its most visible face. In that case, your personal brand becomes the shortcut through which people evaluate the whole company. Your tone, your style, your public values, your communication decisions: they all reverberate on the brand you represent.

A recent Axios investigation explores this dynamic in the context of some of the most recognised companies in the US. Axios is a respected US media outlet known for data-driven reporting on politics, business, and society. In May 2025, they published an article titled “Reputation damage: how CEOs are hurting their brands” (read it here) that revealed how public perceptions of CEOs directly impact brand reputation, and in some cases, business performance.

According to the report, Starbucks suffered reputational damage not due to product failure, but because of growing criticism of CEO Laxman Narasimhan’s leadership style. Boeing, already under scrutiny for safety issues, experienced further erosion in public trust as its CEO was perceived as detached and unaccountable. In contrast, CVS, a major US healthcare and pharmacy chain, improved its standing under the leadership of Karen Lynch, whose personal positioning on healthcare reform and operational competence was seen as strengthening the brand’s legitimacy.

The case of Unilever also deserves mention. Under CEO Paul Polman, the brand was internationally associated with sustainability, long-term thinking, and responsible capitalism. But after his departure, new leadership shifted focus more visibly toward short-term profitability. While not a dramatic collapse, this shift has softened Unilever’s brand distinctiveness and reduced the emotional capital it had built with stakeholders who admired its bold sustainability stance. The leadership change diluted some of the brand’s symbolic power.

Now, while these are examples from large corporations, the principle applies just as clearly — if not more directly — in smaller businesses and personal practices. The logic doesn’t change; only the scale does. In large organisations, the game is often played in the media, with a vast and diverse public watching. But in smaller businesses (whether you're a consultant, a founder, a lawyer, or a coach), your public is smaller, more concrete, and much closer to you. Reputations in these contexts are built and damaged through direct interactions, referrals, word of mouth, and tightly knit networks. People don’t need a press release to form a perception about who you are and what your brand represents. They draw conclusions from a conversation, a recommendation, or a single encounter. And because the audience is more concentrated and connected, the impact of your personal brand is often faster, stronger and more enduring.

This isn’t anecdotal. It’s how our brains work. As Daniel Kahneman demonstrated, we rely on heuristics, or shortcuts, when navigating complexity. And nothing is more efficient than evaluating a company through the person who leads it. We relate to people faster and more emotionally than to systems, buildings or strategies. When we don't fully understand what a business does or stands for, we judge it by who we see. In the absence of clarity, your personal brand becomes the brand.

Brand theory has long offered language for this phenomenon. David Aaker, one of the pioneers of brand thinking, showed that brands live in our minds through associations: not facts, but feelings, expectations, memories and symbols. Later, Kevin Lane Keller explained that those associations form a mental network. When people think of you, they don’t recall your job title. They recall how you made them feel, what you stood for, or how they first discovered you.

This gives us a practical challenge: what associations are you planting in the minds of your audience?

A helpful way to map them is to think in three layers:

• Functional associations: what you're good at. Your capabilities, your track record, the results you produce. These are usually the first associations people form.
• Emotional associations: how you make others feel. This includes your tone of voice, your presence, the level of trust or energy people associate with you.
• Spiritual associations: what you stand for. The ideals, causes or values that people link to your name, whether you talk about them directly or not.

Most professionals and executives operate on the functional level. Some go further and build emotional resonance. Few are clear, or intentional, about the spiritual associations they carry.

But your association map matters. Because the type of associations you cultivate determines the kind of relationship you establish with your audience. Do you want to be seen as the most competent in the field? As someone who inspires trust and connection? Or as a reference of purpose and integrity?

Each of these positions creates a different kind of bond. In a future article, I’ll show how these bonds translate into different types of brand relationships: some more transactional, others more loyal, and others truly transformative.

But the first step is this. Understand what they associate with you now, and decide what you want those associations to become.