Are businesses sacrificing their brands in the pursuit of personal visibility?

There’s an interesting contradiction developing at a point where organisations need stronger, clearer brands. A quick scroll on LinkedIn shows that increasing amounts of time and energy are being invested in the cultivation of personal brands.

But in the pursuit of personal visibility are businesses sacrificing their own?

Business owners are often told they need to become content creators, directors to become commentators and employees to focus on becoming influencers, with marketing strategies being built around the visibility of individuals, rather than the organisations they represent.

And whilst people do buy from people, the issue here isn’t whether people matter - because of course they do - the issue is what happens when an individual becomes more memorable than the organisation itself.

In extreme cases, businesses find themselves in a position where customers feel they ‘know’ the team yet remain unclear about what the company does. Individuals’ opinions are visible and their personalities dominate communications, but the business proposition itself is never articulated with the same clarity.

This creates several risks. If the visibility of an organisation depends too heavily upon an individual, growth can become more difficult. People evolve more quickly than organisations and, when positioning becomes too closely tied to personality, the brand itself can become unstable.

Buyers may enjoy a founder’s commentary, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into understanding the business itself, and the strongest companies are those that understand the distinction between visible leadership and organisational confidence.

The rarest and most valuable position is where the ‘voice’ of the business and the business itself are fully aligned; where the individual representing the organisation embodies the same values, ethics and principles that the company seeks to project.

When that alignment exists, personal visibility can strengthen the corporate brand, but when it doesn’t, the individual and the organisation can begin to tell different stories, creating confusion rather than confidence.

The role of leadership is to provide trust, while the role of brand is to provide continuity. However, the challenge facing many businesses is not that their leaders are becoming too visible, but that their organisations are quietly losing visibility behind them.