The Brand Edit

Photo Credit: LolaVie Here's a question to ask before you launch anything new under your own name: will people actually believe it's really you, or will it feel like you bolted a product onto your name because it was trendy or profitable? That reaction, the gut sense that something either fits or doesn't, isn't random, and it isn't something your audience is consciously deciding. It's a specific piece of psychology, and once you understand it, you can predict whether a new o

Not every partnership is a smart one, even the flattering ones. Here's how to tell whether a collaboration will strengthen your personal brand or quietly water it down.

Laura Bull - Brand Strategist This idea that we are both the CEO and the product being sold is a topic that has been coming up on my coffee chats a lot recently, so I thought I’d share with the class. It’s one of the main reasons I wrote From Individual to Empire and something I taught frequently at SMU because, when you are building a business around a personal brand, one of the hardest parts has very little to do with marketing. When you are the face of a business, the line

The success of Rare Beauty demonstrates something consumer psychologists have understood for decades: people are naturally drawn to brands that reflect and reinforce the values they already hold. Shared values create familiarity, familiarity creates trust, and over time, that trust becomes advocacy.

In June 2026, Rolex officially named Priyanka Chopra Jonas as its newest Global Brand Ambassador. At first glance, it looked like another celebrity partnership. One of the most famous women in the world joins one of the most recognizable luxury brands in the world. A big announcement and a beautiful campaign. Priyanka Chopra Jonas has also been a global ambassador for Bulgari since 2021. And Bulgari is not some unrelated brand sitting in a completely different category. It is

Laura Bull - Brand Strategist I know some of you have been secretly thinking it. Don't be embarrassed, I hear it all the time. "Can't AI just do this whole personal branding thing now?" Here's the honest answer: AI can do the content. The posts, the messaging, the captions, the presence. Hand it a prompt and it will produce a content calendar before your coffee gets cold, and if that's all personal branding requires, we'd be done here. But it isn't. And we're not. Content is

I have been in rooms with people who had every reason to be compelling and somehow were not. The credentials were there. The track record was real. The message was solid. But something was missing, and no amount of better content or a more consistent posting schedule would fix it. I have also been in rooms where someone walked in without a fraction of the pedigree and owned the conversation from the first sentence. The difference was never the content. It was always the ident

By now, you have probably seen the coverage of Alix Earle's Reale Actives skincare launch. The mystery Instagram account, @wtfisalixdoing, racked up hundreds of thousands of followers before anyone knew what she was building. The billboard in New York City with a puzzle piece and no brand name. The Tonight Show appearance. The headlines about anticipation marketing and the genius of the cryptic rollout. All of that coverage is fine. But these are all marketing tactics, not br

I was recently featured in Authority Magazine to talk about brand makeovers and what it actually takes to upgrade and re-energize your image. Before launching The Brand Management Company, I spent ten years at Sony Music building global artists. That experience shaped how I think about brand development. Artists who lasted weren’t the ones with the loudest campaigns. They were the ones with a clearly defined identity that guided every decision behind the scenes.

Whitney Wolfe Herd could have been permanently defined as the Tinder co-founder who was forced out amid a highly public sexual harassment and discrimination lawsuit against a fellow co-founder. Instead, she repositioned the story, and built Bumble into a billion-dollar brand.

Awards season has evolved into the world’s most influential branding stage. What was once focused solely on accolades and a showcase of talent or artistic recognition now functions as a high-stakes arena for personal branding, brand strategy, and cultural positioning.

Most leaders don’t notice the shift at first. It rarely arrives in a dramatic moment or public crisis. Instead, it shows up quietly: a comment lands heavier than expected, a casual remark is treated as directive, a thought spoken aloud is interpreted as intent. For Marc Benioff, that moment has played out very publicly over the past several months. From high-stakes public commentary to aggressive, AI-driven restructuring, every word and decision has reverberated far beyond th

Casamigos doesn’t scream for attention, yet somehow, when you walk into a restaurant, a liquor store, or scroll past a photo of friends on vacation, you recognize it instantly. You feel it before you consciously register it. That recognition isn’t luck, it’s brand strategy and George Clooney.

By the end of the year, your brand has likely shifted more than you think. A softened message here, a visual that doesn’t quite match there, a team member using language that feels A rebrand is visible. It’s fast. It’s exciting and there’s a certain satisfaction in pointing at a shiny new logo and saying, “Look! We’ve changed!” But if your brand story underneath is still unclear, all you’ve done is put a new outfit on the same confusion. The look is different, but the ident

Lately, it feels like every brand is hopping on the “rebrand” train. New logos. New colors. Fresh taglines. But most of the time, a rebrand isn't what your brand actually needs. A rebrand is visible. It’s fast. It’s exciting and there’s a certain satisfaction in pointing at a shiny new logo and saying, “Look! We’ve changed!” But if your brand story underneath is still unclear, all you’ve done is put a new outfit on the same confusion. The look is different, but the identit

In the rush to look “modern,” many companies are wiping away the very traits that make them memorable. The branding industry seems to think sleek logos and plain designs are the answer, but this often leaves brands feeling empty and forgettable. Personality is what draws people in and keeps them coming back. Cracker Barrel’s recent rebrand misstep shows exactly what happens when a company forgets what makes it unique. The Problem With Modern Branding Today’s branding trend le

Sometimes the best brand stories start in the middle of a mess. Like at a Coldplay concert, during a kiss cam moment gone wildly viral. It was July 2025. The internet was on fire over a now-infamous clip from the show of a not-so-private exchange between two people in the crowd. The philandering CEO, and the company’s Chief HR Officer at a company called Astronomer. Within hours, the moment had been memed, dissected and shared millions of times all across the world. But while

Every marketing professor has faced the moment when the principles of a traditional textbook collide with the reality of modern branding....

Imagine a personal brand so magnetic, so buzzworthy, that within hours of a campaign launch it drives a 4% bump in stock price for a major retailer. That’s exactly what happened on July 23, 2025, when American Eagle partnered with actress Sydney Sweeney for what would become its most expensive campaign to date. What’s remarkable is that a celebrity partnership actually moved investor sentiment in real time. Sydney Sweeney didn’t magically drive results because she’s famous. S

When HBO Max dropped “HBO” and rebranded as “Max” in 2023, the move wasn’t just cosmetic. It was a repositioning play. The goal was to...