Personal Brand vs Company Brand: Which One Are You Really Building?

Andréa Jones [00:00:00]:
Should you build your business under your personal brand or your company brand? This past weekend I was at a panel for High Vibe Women. It was amazing. Uh, the panel itself was all about scaling with ease, but this question came in from one of the panelists who is a lawyer trying to decide as she builds her law practice, is it under her personal brand, which is how she started, or should she split it into having a personal brand and a company brand? And then where should she place her focus? Live on the panel, I said, I'm gonna turn this into content. So here I am doing exactly that, and I'm excited to dive into it in this episode. But first, a word from our sponsor. Riverside is the all-in-one podcast recording and editing tool that I use for this right here show. I use it to edit not only the audio and the video. It is like chef's kiss magical, making the entire process so, so easy.

Andréa Jones [00:00:53]:
Plus, I love their Magic AI clips. Their little AI robot in the background pulls out the most impactful moments of the episodes without me having to comb through and do it myself, resizes them for social media. So those vertical videos you see on TikTok and Reels, those all come from Magic AI inside of Riverside. It's literally one click. It spits out 10 clips. I pick the best one and away I go. Saves me so much time. If you want to get on the Riverside train, check it out today.

Andréa Jones [00:01:23]:
The link's in the show notes and make sure to use my code DREA. DREA at checkout to get 15% off your membership. So what I love about the question for this episode today is not should you focus on your personal brand or company brand, it's which one's going to make me the most money. Okay. I feel like that is the question. It's like, where do I put my efforts so that I get the most return on the investment? And I'm going to come out and straight up and say I have lots of opinions about these. But at the end of the day, it comes down to you. It's not a right or wrong.

Andréa Jones [00:01:59]:
Okay. We see many, many companies get lots of success by having a company. We see a lot of personal brands have success running it as a personal brand. So my advice to you listening to this episode, yes, you listening to this episode, is as I share my opinions and I give you the data and the experiences and the anecdotal stories to back up those opinions, You then decide which one you want to do. Okay? Because at the end of the day, they both can work. They both have their pros and cons. This is a what makes sense for your business type of conversation. Okay? So my kind of overarching advice is to KISS it.

Andréa Jones [00:02:38]:
Keep it simple, silly. Okay? I want your marketing strategy to be as simple as possible, and for a lot of times that's focusing on one thing. One brand is easier to manage than two. Multiples can work, okay? But generally speaking, about 80% of you listening to this podcast, you're doing this yourself, okay? You're doing it for your own business and you have a smaller team and you're sitting there scratching your head wondering, how the heck am I gonna manage two accounts? And yet we still try to do it. Okay? So my goal is to create a strategy that's scalable, a strategy that's sustainable, one that you can actually implement, not something that just lives in like a Google document somewhere as aspirational. Okay, so the story behind this question— so I'm sitting on this panel at High Five Women, right? And like part of me is already having the imposter syndrome of like, why am I here? Yes, I scaled my business, but I exited, right? I sold it. And so scaling with ease is what the panel is all about. And so a lot of my kind of advice ends up being scaling, not just monetarily.

Andréa Jones [00:03:44]:
Okay. Because a lot of people think about scaling as monetary. How much money can my business make? But I'm in a season of life where I'm trying to scale my time. Y'all, I have an almost 4-year-old and an almost 2-year-old, and I want to spend more time with them. I want to spend more time working on my passion projects, like writing my silly little romance novels. I want to spend more time frolicking. I have a whole game plan this summer for getting back out on my skates and skating down the freaking trails that I live near now, right? So my scaling is, yes, I want to make money, yes, I got to pay the bills, but also I'm scaling my time, I'm scaling my business so that— so that— okay, I'm scaling so that— if you can't answer that so that question, then the scaling question is going to be very hard for you. But I'm scaling so that I have those things.

Andréa Jones [00:04:34]:
So this lawyer is asking me this question on the panel. Shout out to Elena. Hi, Elena. Um, and she's saying, you know, she's a lawyer. She started her law practice as just her, but now she has a team of lawyers who are working under her, lawyers with different skill sets, lawyers who bring different interests to the table, lawyers who aren't her and have different skills, right? So her question is, do I have the law practice and that my social media handles under my name, or do I create a company account for that. So I'm going to start off speaking to Elena, but I'm talking to all of you, okay? Because this is not just about the naming of it. I truly believe names almost mean nothing, okay? Almost. Some have a little bit of a stickiness to them.

Andréa Jones [00:05:19]:
You kind of have to have storytelling behind it. But think about some of the biggest companies— their names mean nothing. Starbucks— what the heck does that mean? Starbucks— if you hear the name out of context, do you immediately think coffee? Like, if you think about it, what does What would Starbucks have to do with the copy? The name almost has nothing— it doesn't have an impact, right? They created a brand behind the name and that's what it stands for. Even think about your favorite celebrities, for example, Oprah. Oprah as a name by itself doesn't really mean anything. It's her personal brand, her marketing behind that that adds a value to the name. So to me, in my opinion, and a lot of marketers may disagree with this, but in my opinion, the name means nothing. Okay? So you can decide, do you want a personal brand or do you want a company brand? Your real question is how does this affect how you show up in your marketing? If it's you as a personal brand, does that change how you market versus a company? If it's you as a personal brand, does it change the content you're creating? Is it going to change access to you? Is it going to change access to your team? Is it going to have an implication about future growth? Okay, this is actually a business model decision, not a branding decision.

Andréa Jones [00:06:35]:
So I'll give an example of a big brand in the online space that is a personal brand that you all probably know. Marie Forleo. Marie Forleo is a personal brand, and yet when we go to marieforleo.com and we fill out the contact form, there is never in a million years an expectation that she herself is personally responding to that email. Okay, so while her brand is a personal brand, we understand and we fully accept that her brand name is really an entity. Okay, so she has a team of people helping her create her content. She has a team of people delivering her product. She has a team of people perhaps on her customer service side. We have no expectation that because she's creating her content that we have access to her.

Andréa Jones [00:07:23]:
We have no expectation that it's just her running her business. Okay. So you can have a business model that relies on your name. We can take the same thing for Starbucks. We understand the Starbucks business model. We understand the logo. There's like an individual kind of the face of Starbucks, right, that we understand that goes with that. We understand that Starbucks, though, is an entity, is not a person.

Andréa Jones [00:07:45]:
Like, we understand that. We're not silly. So I think that that comes down to a business model decision. So, Elena, for you as a lawyer, You— there are so many law practices, they all have names. It's, um, either the name of the lawyer or the partner's names together. We have no expectation of— even if we reach out to that law office, in my opinion, I don't expect the lawyer whose name is on the door to respond to an email or that I'm working with them personally all of the time. Okay, so I think that comes down to a business model decision. And sometimes you have a container for your business that just works for you.

Andréa Jones [00:08:22]:
So figure out that container and it's not the thing that you think needs to look or sound a certain way. It's like what actually is going to work for your business. Okay, so let's dive into the 3 different options that you have in here, which is a personal brand, a company brand, and hybrid. Okay. And I'll use a few examples for each and I'm actually going to use my business as an example here. So personal brand is built around your name, your face, your story, your reputation. People are buying kind of into you as a personality. Okay, so they want you.

Andréa Jones [00:08:59]:
When I work with brands, a lot of the times they see my face on Online Drea. They see me in the podcast. Y'all are listening to me in the podcast. I use a lot of my stories, my reputation. When you join the lab, there's an expectation that I'm going to be in some of the videos, but I still have a team of people helping me. Okay? So that's a personal brand. A company brand is built around identity separate from you. So people are buying into the company.

Andréa Jones [00:09:23]:
My work with Uncommon Marketing Agency is a great example of this. I am still the face of that company, y'all. Like, you will almost never see my business partner Richard over there. Um, it's me. So when we think about that company, it's an entity separate from me. When people are buying into Uncommon Marketing Agency, They're buying into our process, they're buying into the outcome, they're buying into our team, they're buying into that structure. So the business identity is set up in such a way that that's the case and we're actually building that one to potentially be sellable or scalable in a different way than my personal brand is. Okay.

Andréa Jones [00:10:02]:
Now you can also have a hybrid approach to this, something that you're building that is trust building but also is an entity. When I worked with Hello7, I think that's a great example of it. Rachel Rodgers is the face of that company. One of the things that we did for them in that, in that project is we took the Rachel Rodgers personal brand and we took the Hello7 personal brand and we created two separate Instagram accounts for them because they were at an inflection point in the company where they needed separate identities for the separate areas of the business. The only time I recommend doing that is when you have a team to support you. If you're just one person, please just choose between personal or company. Okay? A personal brand says, come work with me. When you come to my personal brand, you're hiring me to speak.

Andréa Jones [00:10:51]:
When you purchase a product from me, 9 times out of 10, I'm the one delivering that. It's my voice that you hear. It's my face that you see in those products. So people, when they come to the personal brand, that's expectation. When you have a company brand, the expectation is come work with us. Okay, come work with us. And when you have a hybrid, it's like, hi, I'm here, I'm going to open the door and welcome you. But there's a whole room behind me, and that's the work that I'm doing with Uncommon.

Andréa Jones [00:11:17]:
That's the work that kind of my personal brand helps with both. Okay, now let's talk about the pros of personal brand, because I love having a personal brand account. I really, truly love it. And so I want to talk through This isn't a pitch, but this is just some things to think about. So when you have a personal brand, I think it's really, really strong because people connect with people. The data, the studies show that face and voice of a real human builds familiarity faster. When you have a human there, you don't just have a caricature. You have the dynamic of their stories, their opinions, their lived experience.

Andréa Jones [00:11:56]:
You don't have to manufacture personality. What you see is what you get. And one of the biggest compliments I get is when people say, oh, you're just like you are on the podcast, or you're just like you are in person. Except one time. So my nail lady said to me one time, she was like, man, you're not really like you are on the podcast. I'm like, girl, that's because I am chill here. I am like, zone out, meditating, not talking. That's, that's when I get my nails done.

Andréa Jones [00:12:20]:
But 9 times out of 10, for me, it's a big compliment. People say you are like you are on your offers. What I also have been really loving on the personal brand side is that I can change my mind and it's part of my story and I can evolve. And the expectation is for me to evolve. People often buy one thing from me, but then they end up coming into my world and being a part of my catalog and being a community member and a friend even because of the things that I'm working on. And so I think for a lot of business owners listening to this podcast, you're going to want to go the personal brand route. And it's why I teach the things that I teach inside of the LinkedIn Challenge. It's why I teach I teach the way that I teach is because 80% of you listening to this podcast, you're service providers, you're experts, you're speakers, you're coaches, you're consultants, you're creators, and it makes sense to have a personal brand for that.

Andréa Jones [00:13:13]:
So if you're trying to decide, I want you to think about this. Are people hiring you for your expertise specifically? Is your business very relationship-driven? Are you already the main attraction? Like if someone emails, are you the one responding? Those are the questions. If you can say yes to those questions, then you're probably going to be a personal brand because people are buying you. They're buying your brain, your perspective, your presence. And that can make a lot of sense. Now, there are some cons for a personal brand. I got to be honest, it's heavy, y'all. It's heavy.

Andréa Jones [00:13:46]:
When we think about personal branding, we feel like as a personal brand, like we have to always show up. We become the content engine, the trust engine. I have tried to outsource this part as a personal brand. It's very challenging. And it's why a lot of personal brands come to me and my agency when it comes to outsourcing, because I have spent a lot of time and energy figuring out how to scale personal brands. It's not impossible, but it takes a lot of time and energy, and you still need the person behind the personal brand. Now, there are ways that we can kind of maximize that, and the Marie Forlios, the Amy Porterfields, the Pat Flynn's of the world do a really great example of this. But even then, a lot of them are switching into company brands because of this.

Andréa Jones [00:14:31]:
The con is that the bigger you grow, the harder it is to maintain a personal brand that doesn't end up feeling like you're just blogging and vlogging. Okay. Once you add a team, there's also a bit of a, I don't know if dissociation is the right word, but we kind of feel disconnected from our personal brand because we start saying we. Like a royal we, like Andrea Jones @AndreaJonesWe. And I'm like, I'm just one person technically, but I have a team that's working for me and it can feel awkward. I did struggle with this with scaling my agency in the beginning. By the end, it became very well known that like my agency, even though it was under my name, Online Drea, it was an Online Drea agency and it became its own entity, right? But it can feel awkward to transition from I'm just one person to like, yeah, you're talking to me, but you're going to be working with my amazing team. Right.

Andréa Jones [00:15:21]:
The other thing about having a personal brand is people get this parasocial relationship with you. They feel like they know you and trust you, but they also feel like that personal relationship, like you owe them something. So it can be harder to take time off. It can be harder to take a step back. You feel like whenever I get feedback on something, like the biggest thing for me is people hate my voice. I don't know why, but on the podcast sometimes I get reviews where people are like, I don't like your voice. I'm like, okay, well go listen to another podcast. You don't have to say that.

Andréa Jones [00:15:50]:
And then I get all down about it, you know what I mean? And so it can feel heavy. So a question for you is, if you're trying to weigh the pros and cons, do you want to be the face of your company? Like, do you want to be this exposed? And what happens if you need to take a step back? Okay. So yes, a personal brand is very powerful and I think it still is one of the most powerful ways to market and, and, and. Heavy. It's gonna be a lot to carry, and you could build a business that could be harder to exit. Not impossible, just harder. Okay, now let's talk about the pros and cons of having a company brand, because I think company brands are better for team-based businesses. I'm thinking agencies, firms, products like software products, brands, businesses that are designed to be a collective.

Andréa Jones [00:16:34]:
It makes sense to be more team-based, um, because of the very foundation of the business. You're scaling. When people buy that product, there's an expectation that it's a product, not a person. They're buying not just one person's expertise, but a collective of people. It gives a little bit more separation between the business and the people in the business, and it creates room for not just one person being front and center, but a collective of people. So long term, it makes it a lot easier to kind of create an experience that is a collective experience. And this works really beautifully in a lot of marketing, especially someone like a spa group, for instance. If you're showing all the people in the spas, we see a lot of fun trends on TikTok with, um, things like car dealerships and even like go behind the scenes at our manufacturing warehouse or things like that.

Andréa Jones [00:17:28]:
It can be a lot of fun to have a collective experience. So the questions I wanna ask you, if you're trying to decide if this is for you, is are you growing a business that grows beyond you? Is the experience supposed to be collective or it's supposed to be one person? And do you want other people visible in that brand strategy? Like if you want to bring more people into that collective experience, then it makes sense to have a company because a company will create the breathing room for that. People aren't buying a person, they're buying a process. So a company brand kind of fits with that and it makes growth a lot cleaner. If you have to, for instance, change out who's the company spokesperson or kind of adjust strategies, it's a lot easier and cleaner to do because it's not tied to one person. But the big cons of a company brand is just harder to build. Okay? People connect with people, not logos. And the data backs this up.

Andréa Jones [00:18:21]:
People want to connect with individuals. They connect faster with individuals. We shy away from connecting with businesses because we know they're trying to sell us something, right? We know that. And so sometimes we're like, uh, I don't want to follow this company page because they're going to try to sell us something. So it's a lot harder to sell as a company than an individual, and it's like a lot harder to create an ethos that is a personality. Okay. To have a company personality, you're actually creating, it's not based on a person. So you have to have a voice, you have to have positioning, you have to have connection, you have to have warmth, you have to have values, you have to have humor.

Andréa Jones [00:18:55]:
Like all of that needs to be defined so that anyone can step into the marketing role. And so it makes it a lot more challenging to just create content on the fly unless you have that very clear clear, and then because that has to be very clear, it's a lot harder to like change it over time. So yes, you can swap anyone in there, but if you wanna change like your style of humor, for instance, and you wanna start creating more trend content, you need to have everyone on board with that and you need to still have a unique perspective that's different. And I think a lot of people and a lot of brands still kind of like, we as people still kind of expect there to be a face of the brand, a founder or caricature. We see this a lot with brands like Dubsado. DubSado is a language learning company, yes, but they have a character, the bird, who kind of represents what DubSado is, and they created a personal brand to sell their company. So even though it is a company, they created a personal brand and they're using personal brand strategies to sell the company. And we actually see that in the way that they're commenting on social media.

Andréa Jones [00:19:56]:
A lot of brands take a personal brand strategy by having a character. Even some of your favorite beauty brands use other personal brands to build their brand. It's very common for beauty brands to hire celebrities, for example, to sell their products because the celebrities are the personal brand and they need that personal brand element. So the questions to ask yourself is like, do your people expect to see a person or are they expecting to see a polished brand? Um, are you trying to hide? Okay, a lot of people who are asking this question, they are actually trying to hide between a company brand because they don't want to be front and center, but they are the je ne sais quoi of their brand, right? So when people— like, when you're in your marketing, the power is the founder story. Like, we don't want to hide that. That's actually what makes your brand different. And so how can we put that front and center? Are you trying to hide that behind some sort of entity? Okay. And then the last thing is sometimes people choose company brands because they feel like their personality can't stand on its own.

Andréa Jones [00:21:00]:
They feel like they don't have a strong enough perspective, and they actually do. Now, if you want to go the hybrid option, this is oftentimes what I recommend for people who think they want a company brand when in fact they, they're a founder-led business and the founder story is kind of needed accelerate the marketing, especially in the beginning. So you can do the best of both worlds. You can have a founder-led marketing strategy that's not necessarily like totally reliant on the founder, but the founder story can accelerate that connection that people feel to the brand. Um, we see this with the founder of Spanx. Sara Blakely has an amazing founder-led story for her product-based business. And even though she exited and sold that business, they are still leveraging her story to this day. She's still leveraging her story to this day and she pivoted it, her story, into an entirely new company, y'all.

Andréa Jones [00:21:55]:
And so the founder-led story is a great accelerator for companies. The thing is too, with Sarah Blakely, she's visible, but she is not the entire brand strategy. Okay? So your company can grow, but having a founder-led strategy can really layer in that personality and trust building that people really crave when we're connecting with marketing, especially digital marketing. So if you have an education-based business, a firm, a studio, an agency, a product-based business that has a strong founder voice, use a hybrid approach. Um, this is something that can be really helpful while you as the founder remain visible strategically, but you can take steps back. You can highlight other people, you can bring in other stories, and you can be a brand leader without being the brand itself. Okay. So what I recommend is you don't have to disappear from your business or your company.

Andréa Jones [00:22:50]:
Um, if you want to be front and center in your business, absolutely go for the personal brand. Don't even worry about the company brand. That's what I do with Online Drea. If your business is bigger than you and you have a collective, go with the company story. That can be a very powerful way to leverage multiple voices by still adding personality. Or you may want to do the hybrid approach. It's really a sweet spot for a lot of people. I think ultimately the real issue with deciding if you want to be a personal brand, a company brand, or use a hybrid approach is all about capacity and energy budgeting.

Andréa Jones [00:23:22]:
Sometimes people think this is a branding issue, but when I dig into it, y'all don't have time for this. Okay? We don't have time to be managing a personal brand and a company brand because sometimes, a lot of times that means more content, more time, more engagement, more platforms, more confusion. When you're speaking on stage, do you say, hi, I'm the founder of Online Dreher, or do you say, hi, I'm the creative director at Uncommon Marketing Agency? Okay, y'all, it can be confusing. It creates a lot of decision fatigue. So on a very practical level, especially if you do not have a team helping you with this, have as few brands and as few platforms that you can get away with. Okay, what is the minimal viable marketing here? What is the least, uh, work, the least amount of effort that you need to put into this? In order to get the maximum result from your marketing. And that's how you scale with ease, friends. We start with minimal viable marketing and then we scale up from there.

Andréa Jones [00:24:18]:
You do not have to have a team. You do not have to have multiple accounts. You do not have to be everywhere because y'all, complexity is expensive. Expensive. Okay. And I'm on a budget. Okay. Like I said, I'm trying to scale my time and the more complexity I add into my business and my life, the less time that I have.

Andréa Jones [00:24:36]:
So do you actually need a second brand? I don't know. But ask yourself, are you trying to solve a messaging problem? Are you trying to solve a cash flow problem? Are you trying to solve a confusion problem? Are you trying to solve a personal discomfort problem? Hello? Some of y'all don't want a personal brand because you physically feel discomfort when it comes to personal branding. Okay, answer those questions. And then you will have your solution. Okay. Oh my gosh. I'll end with this thought. The best choice you can make with this question is the one that you actually can do.

Andréa Jones [00:25:14]:
Okay. Whether you have a personal brand, company brand, hybrid approach, 1 account, 2 accounts, 10 accounts, I don't really care. All of those things can work if you do them. If you do it, if you can't actually support that level of management, if it cannot support your business, if it feels like you're creating a second job for yourself— hello, I feel like I'm on a preaching spree right now— then it's not going to work for you. Okay, so pick the structure that's going to help you show up consistently, clearly, sustainably. And the goal is to work smarter, not harder. All right, I'll be back soon with another episode. That's all for today.

Andréa Jones [00:25:55]:
Make sure you rate and subscribe, review us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Helps keep us in the top 100 marketing podcasts, and that's all because of your support. I'll see you next week. Bye for now. Oh, before I forget, y'all, next week is episode 400. I'm doing a Q&A episode. I've got some text-based questions. I only got one audio question, y'all.

Andréa Jones [00:26:14]:
I want more audio questions. So head on over to the pinned post on my Instagram. The link is there. You will be able to see what to know what to do to submit your question. Okay, I'll see you then. Bye!