Self-Promotion to Purpose: Rethinking Personal Brands

For many founders, “personal branding” feels uneasy. The idea of turning yourself into the product — your face, your daily life, your every move — can feel at best confusing, at worst icky.

But personal branding doesn’t have to center on you. It can be built around a purpose.

The Risks of Focusing on Self-Promotion

A brand built self-promotion is fragile often demands a lot of output. New content, new achievements, new visibility.

Self-promotion also narrows your audience’s perception. You become known for what you do, not for what you stand for, which is easier to replace.

A purpose-led branding can be expressed in multiple ways, from your offers to your design, your voice, your collaborations. It gives your audience a reason to return even if you’re not visible all the time.

From Self to Purpose

Reframing personal branding means asking yourself, “What am I here to say?” When you talk about your wider purpose and mission, or anchor your brand in disruption or the difference you want to make, your unique space emerges.

It gives your audience something larger to connect with. You show them the change you want to see, the conversations you’re here to push forward. The focus shifts away from your personality and toward the current of ideas you’re carrying.

This gives you authority, positioning yourself through conviction, difference, and vision (all much harder to replicate or compete with than a pretty Instagram feed).

Anchoring in Purpose, Difference, Disruption

When you reframe your personal brand, you need anchors that keep the idea sharp and enduring.

Here are three of the most powerful:

Purpose

Your brand purpose is the guiding ‘why’ behind your brand, and the deeper shift you want to see in your industry or community. If you haven’t found your purpose, visit our post on finding purpose with the brand ikigai framework.

Difference

What perspectives do you have that diverge from others in your industry? Difference positions you not as another option in a crowded category, but an alternative. It sharpens the choice for your audience: do I want that, or do I want this?

Disruption

Disruption is the cultural script you’re rewriting: the patterns you refuse to perpetuate, the assumptions you want to challenge. By naming what you’re here to undo—and what you’re here to replace it with—you show your audience that you’re not just part of the system, but actively reshaping it.

Together, these anchors shift your brand from performance to strategic positioning.

Purpose-Led Positioning in Practice

Brené Brown

• Disruption: Brené Brown reframed leadership and success by centering on vulnerability, courage, and empathy. These qualities are traditionally sidelined in corporate settings, but instead of presenting herself as a polished “guru,” she built her brand by positioning vulnerability as strength.

• Impact: By bridging emotion with professional frameworks, she shifted public conversations and corporate cultures, showing that a personal brand rooted in scholarship and lived humanity can ripple out into systemic change.

Lisa Messenger

• Disruption: Lisa Messenger built her personal brand on radical transparency by sharing failures, pivots, and experiments as openly as her successes. She blurred the boundaries between lifestyle and entrepreneurship, creating a brand that feels aspirational while being relatable.

• Impact: She showed that adaptability can itself be a form of leadership. Her brand proved that honesty and evolution build deeper loyalty than clean success stories.

Julia Lang

• Disruption: Julia Lang’s personal brand works in tandem with her business, VEERT. She rejects traditional men’s/women’s categories and creates collections that exist in-between, framed around inclusivity and unity.

• Impact: VEERT quickly attracted cultural traction, with celebrity wearers and major press, not just for style but for positioning. By weaving values and sustainability (1% for the Planet, FSC packaging) into design, Lang showed how a personal brand can expand into a platform for cultural commentary and collective identity.

Strategy: How to Build Around Purpose

Shifting your personal brand from self-promotion to purpose-led positioning is about creating a framework that consistently orients people to what you stand for.

Four principles can anchor that process:

1. Define your strategy

Ask yourself: What is the one shift I want to be known for? Maybe it’s reframing growth as subtraction. Maybe it’s treating design as cultural commentary. The test: if someone explained your work at a dinner party, would they know the idea that sits at its core?

2. Make It Bigger Than You

Your personal story matters, but can you turn that lived experience into a cultural lens? Position your idea within broader conversations like shifts in business, culture, design, or wellness. You’re not just telling your story, but giving people a language to interpret their own. This creates community: when others can locate themselves in your idea.

3. Repeat Relentlessly

An idea gains traction through rhythm. Return to your idea in different formats — essays, talks, services, visuals. Each time you circle back, you reinforce your authority.

4. Design for Alignment

Ideas are carried not just in words but in how you present them. Let your core stance shape your brand aesthetics and systems. Consistency here makes your positioning unmistakable.

Reflection Prompts

Use these as starting points to sketch the outline of your idea-led brand.

Write freely, then step back and look for the themes that repeat:

1. Spot the stale conversation

• What’s the advice or narrative in my industry that feels overplayed, outdated, or unhelpful?

• How would I say it differently — or what truth is being overlooked?

2. Draw from lived perspective

• What parts of my own journey (burnout, pivots, slow growth, illness, creative process) give me insight others can’t replicate?

• How could that perspective serve as a counterpoint to mainstream advice?

3. Name the core idea

• If my personal brand were built on a single idea instead of my résumé, what would it be?

• What do I want to be known for disrupting, reframing, or championing five years from now?

4. Envision alignment

• If I took this idea seriously, how would it change the way I show up? (my services, my content, my visuals)

• What would I stop doing if this idea became my brand’s north star?

Closing Thoughts

A personal brand anchored in self-promotion is easily forgotten. A personal brand anchored in purpose becomes a platform for change.

That shift is a form of cultural leadership. When you define the difference you want to make, you give others a framework for their own decisions, their own ambitions, their own growth.

Purpose-led brands don’t just attract clients. They gather communities, shape conversations, leave markers for others to follow.

This piece is part of my ongoing exploration into branding as cultural commentary. I’m Hannah Shaw, founder of Studio Founded — a design practice and resource library for founders.