Hi, friends!

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why the idea of the “personal brand” makes so many of us squirm. I think it helps to look backward as language carries memory, and the history of the word brand is no exception.

Consider the etymology: The word comes from the Old Norse word brandr—“to burn.” You see, branding began not as metaphor but in the literal sense. A hot iron seared into livestock or goods to signal ownership! Over time, that scar evolved into a shorthand for identity and quality, then into the logos and marks distinguishing one company’s products from another.

Then came the 1990s. As digital entrepreneurship took off, branding language and tools—once reserved for goods and corporations—jumped species, and we began applying them to people.

What emerged from this moment in the creator economy was transactional: a polished identity packaged for public consumption similar to the many digital and physical goods we were being sold.

Which is why I think our discomfort with the idea of building a personal brand makes a ton of sense. I don't know about you, but I really don't want that for myself!

But there’s a shift afoot: we’re all drowning in so much artifice and AI slop, we’ve become collectively exhausted by it all. When anyone can produce a perfectly polished post or manicured portfolio with the click of a button, what actually catches our attention—what feels premium—is what can't be commodified: the rough drafts, the evolving perspective, the thinking in real time.

As such, the personal brand has mutated form. Now we can comfortably show ourselves to the world as works in progress. And that feels like a relief, doesn’t it?

I've started calling this model of personal brand resonance architecture—though I'll admit, I wrestled with giving it this name at all. The last thing I want is for this to feel like some new formula to follow! But architecture captures something important about the personal brand movement of late: building one requires an element of intentional design. Yet unlike its predecessor that ossified into a set of rigid guidelines and product offerings, this version is built to be lived in, rearranged, and expanded upon as you grow and your interests change.

Here is what it looks like in practice:

• Thinking in public → sharing the earliest, messy versions of our ideas, not just the polished final products.

• Owning a perspective → blending our domain expertise with our quirks, lived experience, and strengths in ways that can’t be copied (not even by AI!).

• Problem-solving out loud → revealing how we think, not just what we deliver.

• Practicing meta-sincerity → what Lucinda Bouncall of Sibling Studio describes as a willingness to risk looking cringe in public spaces in the spirit of owning our professional ambitions and vulnerabilities.

And here are some examples of how it could manifest in your work:

• You post a rough sketch of a framework on LinkedIn that’s 90% baked, inviting feedback before you finalize it.

• You share your thought process behind solving a client problem on your newsletter via a voice note to see if it gets engagement from your audience before building out a mini-offer.

• You let a podcast format experiment turn into a meaty TikTok series which then generates unexpected speaking deals you never saw coming.

We’re already seeing this model expressed by big creators like Khyati Trehan, Tori Dunlap, Madison Butler, Hannah Goefft, and CatGPT. And I believe the reason these creators and others like them are so wildly successful right now is because they’ve subconsciously embraced this resonance architecture model as they’ve built their own personal brands.

So that’s my current working theory: when we show up online in this way, our ideas vibrate outward like a wavelength, the right people feel our energy, they connect with our message and may even amplify it!, building momentum and a buzz about our platforms in ways we could never have planned or imagined.

More to come on this thread in the weeks ahead. I think it’s the beginning of something important in my own body of work, and I’m excited to keep exploring and sharing my thinking with you all!

As always, building with you,

Brie

✨ P.S. → Practicing what I preach about resonance architecture here! if this perspective sparked something for you, I'd love if you'd head over to the original Substack essay and reshare it from there.