Personal brands & how to keep hold of talented people in the age of disruption

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One of the key characteristics of the age of disruption that we are living through, is the changing nature of brand - for businesses, audiences, and in this post I’m going to focus on what that means for individuals, and how the tensions can play out between employers and those who want to develop their own personal brands.

In days of old, the balance between talented individuals and companies was weighted far more towards the company, for a whole range of reasons - routes to market, money, training and support. So talented people would routinely gravitate to work for companies in whatever creative endeavour they chose - music, TV, advertising, movies; front or behind the camera - because they provided the routes to success as well as validation of someone’s talent and creativity. This created all sorts of tensions between individuals and their corporate overlords, which will be highly familiar to everyone working in our profession. How to keep hold of talent is a semi-permanent conversation, and indeed, my bookshelves are overloaded with memoirs written about these relationships and the frustrations that can occur between an individual talent and corporate priorities; musicians, actors, directors, writers and so on.

And since the internet and social platforms emerged, so did the opportunity for people to build an audience and gain notoriety, often (but not always) with the end goal of grabbing the attention of companies: musicians use Myspace, SoundCloud or Spotify, comedians and actors doing sketches on Instagram or TikTok.

Plus of course, a steady stream of influencers have been building their own audiences and doing brand deals going back 20 years. For some, they too saw the appeal of working with traditional media companies for example, as presenters or contestants on reality competition shows. As things have matured, many creators have built an archive of shows with the hope of either packaging them up and selling them to platforms, or alternatively, getting brands or TV commissions off the back of their success. I’ve written about this at length previously - here are just a few posts on this theme:

So far, so obvious, as it has largely been performers, artists and/or those with the ambition to become famous who have built followers in this way. In other words, while the manner in which fandoms can be built and nurtured is new, the desire to become a celebrity or achieve fame and fortune through creative talent is not.