Your brand pages communicate the right stuff to your audience: they’re adding value, they’re selling, educating, building awareness.
But you still find a lot of gap between your brand and the trust they have in it. It’s a very common situation I’ve noticed even on social media like Instagram or Linkedin. Huge brands with enormous followers barely digging in 1% of engagement through their “high quality” content. 10 likes on a really powerful educational reel that’s a month old on a page with 25k+ followers is embarrassing to say the least.
Why does this gap exist? Because there’s not enough trust in a brand.
When audiences know your brand, they trust it. When they trust it, they start caring about what you do as well. But for new brands, this can erupt trouble.
Social media is saturated. Everyone is creating content. Every brand is out there trying to find their voice and audience. They have offers, awareness, features, benefits, products, services that can compete with each other on the highest order but are unable to reach their niche.
The main problem? They’ve forgotten to think about what their audiences want.
The Fall of Polished Content
In 2026, buyers are not looking for highly polished content by brands. With how LLMs have taken over and how easily accessible high-quality content creation has become, buyers have deviated from the high-production, Netflix-style content.
While that still remains entertaining, buying decisions, trusting someone only happens when you build a real, raw relationship with people. And to do that, a brand must invest in authenticity. How?
Ask yourself this question: if buyers don’t want polished content, what do they want?
The answer is simple: they want insights from people who’ve actually been at the fore-front and done the work. And the data backs it: according to Edelman’s Trust Barometer 2025, 62% of global B2B buyers trust individual professionals over corporate brands.
The peculiar thing is that it shows in real-time. If you scroll through LinkedIn for about 10 minutes, you’ll find the sameness in the feed of several founders: same tactics, same templates, same ideas and frameworks. And buyers, audiences can see through such commotion. The bottom line here is that they’re bored of that sameness.
Trust is built in sharing the nitty-gritty journeys, the hows and the whys. Take a very good example from me:
In June I weighed 112 kilograms. While finding an online coach to work with, the first name that popped in my head was a coach I’d been following for a while: 1200 followers, a nutritionist, very well-experienced. But what stood out to me was that he has been in my shoes. He too was over 100 kilos and turned his life around.
That story, his journey right there earned my trust. His personal brand stood out because of his share of the nitty-gritty journey. I know he knows the good and the bad and worse and he’ll understand who I am and where I’ve been and where I want to go. And that remains the key in building trust in your brand: to build a personal brand.
What Is Personal Branding?
When I ask someone what personal branding is, the most common answers I get are one-worded: LinkedIn, Hooks, long-posts, space-between-sentences. While these may be a part of personal branding, none of these things have anything to do with personal branding at all. They’re all social strategies and can be part of any marketing gimmick.
But personal branding is an amalgamation of your experiences, expertise, ideas, skills, and your personality to build your reputation in a given niche to achieve a pre-conceived goal.
And the biggest misconception of personal branding is that people think it can only be built online. Social media only remains a channel through which it can be built upon. Something you can create offline through networking events, targeted PR and niche gigs.
The other is that most founders I speak with think their personal brand has to be forged. And that is completely false. A personal brand is framed, shaping your reputation through authority, and association. If you don’t control your narrative, the market will do it for you.
How To Build A Personal Brand In Any Industry?
If you’re a founder and want to build a personal brand in any industry, you need to understand one thing: it’s about how you’re perceived in the industry, not the industry itself.
It’s perception design. You may think that if you’re in FinTech, you need to talk only about it. But that’s just a surface-level game. You need to make larger conversations as a founder, as a FinTech founder, as a founder in Tech, about the things around that can directly affect your industry, your struggles as a founder, your growth or passion for FinTech; where does it all come from?
So no matter the niche, these 6 steps will give you more clarity on building your founders personal brand:
1. Overcome The Fear Of Being Seen
According to Founder Reports 2026, 87.7% of entrepreneurs struggle with at least one mental health issue, with over 30% of them citing imposter syndrome as an issue. This can be a huge problem for founders building personal brands since it’s all about consistently showing up at the right places.
In my experience with founders, the #1 problem I hear founders face before we start working is “I don’t know how to show up.” Now that’s not a skill problem. It’s an identity problem. And here’s a shift that helps by a lot:
You may need something more than confidence, and maybe that can be an alter-ego that can consistently show up for you. Think about it: Beyonce has Sasha Fierce; Eminem has Slim Shady. Both are alter-egos that are optimized for consistent visibility.
2. Find Your Superpower
The most forgettable founders are the ones who try to be too well-rounded. You need to think about what does the internet really reward: clear associations.
And then ask yourself what do you associate yourself the most with? That one idea people associate you with. Not 5 ideas. Not 10 topics.
All you need is one powerful signal. Once you have that, start digging deeper.
Pick your initial two channels and show consistently, long enough for you to become inevitable.
Remember, you need to be recognizable somewhere to build authority. And then eventually expand it.
3. Build A Tribe Through Shared Language
Identity means loyalty, not audience.
And the strongest personal brands create a sense of belonging. As difficult as it sounds, these are ways you can use to create a feeling of belonging with your founder’s personal brand:
– Shared language
– Inside terms
– Repeated ideas
– Small rituals
The best example you can witness in real-time is Alex Hormozi. Something as small as wearing nose-strips became a signal for his audience which shows that they consume as well as participate. That’s identity design right there for you. If people recognize you through common signals, you’ve started building a strong personal brand.
4. Become The “House of Worship” In Your Niche
This is a common mistake I’ve noticed after working with so many founders; they think educating and teaching is the only content that’s needed. But that’s farthest from the fact. And that’s where so many founders get stuck.
That’s useful, not memorable. Translate reality instead of teaching. Meaning, show your audience why things work, what’s really happening, and how to think instead of what to do. Your content and personal brand becomes ideological.
5. Purpose Is What Converts
Hot-takes, criticism, negativity may all get you attention. But they don’t build trust. And trust is the only thing that converts.
According to Amra & Elma, 81% of customers need to trust a brand before buying from it.
How to build trust? Evoke positive emotional states from your audience like curiosity, aspirational, playfulness or hope. And this comes from one thing: who are you an advocate for? Because when people feel like you represent audiences like them, that’s when attention turns into loyalty; and loyalty turns into money.
6. Packaging Is Positioning:
The visual identity of your personal brand is a signal, not a decoration. Your hair, style, clothing, lighting, background, colors all contribute to your personal brand’s visual design. They manage to speak to your audience before you even try to say something. And they help form your first impression.
When you consistently show up with your identifier, it creates recognition, familiarity and trust. And in a market that’s already full, being recognized is half the game. Because when people see your packaging, they could put it on and feel like they belong.
Create, build and clarify these steps before you step into setting your personal branding goals and social strategy. Personal branding thrives on data-driven strategies, and human-understanding at the core.
About The Author
Dayal Punjabi is a leading Personal Branding & Thought Leadership Strategist with a decade of experience. He’s been featured on Linkedin News India and listed as “Top 24 LinkedIn India Marketers in 2024” by Business Talkz.
He also hosts Influence – Personal Branding for Founders, a podcast for solopreneurs, entrepreneurs, creators, founders, investors, and coaches who want to build their online presence and become thought leaders. Each episode aims to solve a specific problem with actionable insights and strategies. It has charted at #2 in Botswana, #3 in India & #6 in Armenia on Apple Podcasts in Marketing.
An avid advocate of storytelling and Human to Human (H2H) Content, Dayal is also a co-author to several books, most notably “You Are All I Need” by Penguin Random House India.
Follow him on LinkedIn, Instagram or listen to his podcast here.
