Retail Observer

RETAILOBSERVER.COM FEBRUARY 2026 28 W e watched her freeze mid-sentence – a senior executive, mid- presentation, was suddenly aware that every word coming out of her mouth belonged to someone else. It was all just some brand stylist's language, LinkedIn's smooth, all-too-perfect, and ultimately forgettable dialect, a carefully calibrated "authentic voice" that had nothing to do with the sharp, funny, occasionally profane leader her team knew and loved. She stopped, laughed, looked around, and said, "This isn't me at all, is it?" The room seemed to exhale. Someone let out an audible sigh. Another clapped. The atmosphere shifted from tension to comfort. Later, she told us that moment was a turning point – the turning wasn't in her message, but in her sense of self and presence. It was the day she stopped performing her leadership and started inhabiting it. THE SEDUCTION OF THE BRAND For years, we've been told that leaders need a personal brand – an identity distilled and refined for the masses: messaging polished for the market, dressed up with the right pose, the right clothes, the right words, the right presence. Then, supposedly, you would finally own your lane. It's easy to understand the appeal. Branding offers clarity, control, and the comfort of coherence in a world that won't stop shouting. It claims to make your value legible, predictable, and safe. Here's the unconventional truth: personal branding fails at the very thing it promises. Not because the tools are broken, but because the premise is. THE NARROWING A brand is a compression. It squeezes ideas, traits, and tone into something containable and repeatable, something you can recognize at a glance. It's built for efficiency and scale. But humans aren't efficient, or consistent, or easily pinned down. Jung understood the psyche as polyphonic: not just a single coherent self, but a chorus of voices, impulses, and contradictions. Post-Jungian thinker James Hillman described the self as a "parliament of gods" – multiple centers of being, each with a legitimate claim to the mic. Try to brand that complexity. Try to capture an evolving human in a logo, a tagline, or a marketing slogan. You can't. The moment you try, your human vitality is stripped away. You become easier to describe – and harder to recognize. WHAT WE TRADE Presence isn't predictability. Research on organizational trust tells us that people don't follow polish, they follow attunement. In high- performing teams, the leaders who create safety and spark aren't the most consistent; they're the most responsive, and the most attentive to what's actually happening in the room. That kind of presence can't be templated or distilled into bio bullet points. It grows through contradiction and reflection – through the chrysalis-like discomfort of your own unique becoming. Branding, by contrast, says: decide what you stand for and stick to it. Stay on message. Smooth the edges. But the leaders we remember are the ones who changed their minds; who admitted uncertainty; who let us see their effort, their struggle, their imperfections, and the wisdom that comes with it. When you build a personal brand, you're merchandising yourself. You shrink countless learnings, a life, a living, and a joyous laughing organism into a product. LET IT LEAK The leaders who move us aren't the ones with the cleanest positioning. They can seem mysterious and unpredictable, yet reliable. They're the ones whose humanity seeps through, the ones whose contradictions make them relatable and trustworthy. As the Tao Te Ching reminds us: the usefulness of a cup is in its emptiness, not its form. The power of leadership lives in the space we hold, not the image we project. So here's a different strategy: Forget your personal brand. Become someone worth encountering. Let your presence rearrange the room. Let your story emerge from the work; from the questions that still haunt you; from the mistakes you've owned; from the mysteries you're still figuring out. Give people access to the rough and real, not the reduced, reused, rehearsed. A brand is just a signal. Human presence is an enlivening force. When we trade presence for packaging, we lose the whole point of the work: the messy, contradictory, irreducible fact of being human. Your complexity isn't a liability, it's the thing that makes you worth following. YOU ARE NOT A PRODUCT– RETHINKING PERSONAL BRANDING Steven Morris On Brand Steven Morris is a brand, culture and leadership advisor, author, and speaker. Over his 25+ years in business he's worked with 3,000+ business leaders at 250+ global and regional companies. Discover: https://matterco.co RO

• Cover