The most compelling personal brands aren’t built on perfection

I don’t need to tell you what the job market looks like right now, or the heightened sense of precarity marketers are feeling due to cuts to marketing budgets and looming redundancies. It’s the perfect playground for imposter syndrome to flourish – and for personal branding to feel like a survival imperative rather than a choice.

Personal branding has become a cornerstone of modern professional life. Whether you’re actively cultivating it or not, your digital footprint, your workplace reputation and how others perceive you combine to create something like a brand.

Not everyone resonates with or feels comfortable with this concept – and that’s perfectly fine. But we all have a professional reputation and if we don’t curate it and manage it, others will do it for us. Personally, I would rather be in the driving seat when it comes to my professional reputation rather than a passenger.

But, there’s a fundamental paradox in how we approach personal branding. We’re told to “be authentic”, while simultaneously being pushed to craft an idealised version of ourselves that will appeal to employers and clients. This contradiction creates a psychological tension that can feed what I call our imposter gremlins, rather than silence them.

When your professional identity becomes a performance, every interaction carries the weight of potential exposure.

I’m a huge advocate for personal branding and believe it is relevant for in-house, agency and freelance marketers alike. The problem isn’t personal branding itself – it’s that the sequence is sometimes wrong; when we focus on building our brand before we’ve taken time to look inward. The most authentic personal brands emerge naturally from understanding our professional identity, recognising our unique talents and cultivating our reputation.

This issue is particularly acute in graduate and early talent recruitment. In our rush to attract “the best and brightest”, we’ve created a system that manufactures imposter syndrome from day one. Look at any graduate scheme posting today and you’ll find a laundry list of requirements that would challenge even a seasoned professional: exceptional communication skills, advanced technical capabilities, leadership potential, commercial awareness and the ever-vague ‘Ability to hit the ground running.’ All this for someone who’s just completed their education.

Develop your professional identity to help silence the imposter gremlin

We compound this problem by pushing early talent to build their personal brand before they’ve had the chance to develop any real professional identity. Career advisors and recruitment specialists encourage them to position themselves as “thought leaders” and “industry innovators” when they should be focusing on learning the basics of their chosen field.

For what it’s worth, if like me, you’ve got an imposter gremlin, I don’t think we can ever get rid of it, but we can make it smaller, put it in a cage and not feed it. For starters, the phrase ‘Fake it ’til you make it’ can get in the bin. Recently, I heard about a marketing graduate who was advised to embellish their CV with fabricated achievements and a grander-sounding job title because their previous role was “just admin”. This kind of advice doesn’t just feed the imposter gremlin – it breeds it. It’s part of a larger pattern where early talent is pushed to perform rather than develop

This premature push toward personal branding creates a dangerous disconnect between image and reality. Instead of developing authentic professional identities through experience and reflection, graduates feel pressured to project an idealised version of themselves that they can’t possibly live up to.

Attaining genuine self-belief

This pressure on early talent to maintain a polished professional façade is then supercharged by social media. What starts as embellishing a CV inevitably evolves into maintaining a constant online performance. The pressure to maintain a consistent online presence pushes professionals – from graduates to senior leaders – to stake out positions and claim expertise before they’re ready.

LinkedIn becomes a theatre where everyone’s playing a role rather than sharing genuine insights and experiences. The result? A sea of ‘thought leaders’ who haven’t led anything, ‘innovators’ who haven’t innovated and ‘experts’ whose expertise is primarily in personal promotion.

This disconnect between brand and reality exacts a heavy psychological toll. When your professional identity becomes a performance, every interaction carries the weight of potential exposure. You’re constantly managing the gap between who you claim to be and who you actually are. The energy spent maintaining this façade could be better invested in professional development.

The most compelling personal brands aren’t built on perfection – they’re built on authenticity.

I’ve seen this play out consistently in my work with marketers. There’s an almost palpable relief when someone realises they don’t need to have all the answers or project perfection. The irony is that acknowledging your limitations and sharing your learning process often creates a more compelling and authentic presence than any carefully curated personal brand.

Professional identity is not the same as personal brand. It can (and should) feed into that work. In fact, the most successful personal brands are built on an understanding of professional identity that embraces depth and breadth, and allows for evolution. It’s a process not an outcome.

Developing a clear understanding of your professional identity goes deeper than the external presentation that branding suggests. It encompasses your values, purpose, skills, experiences and the unique perspective you bring to your work. It’s about knowing who you are professionally, separate from any particular role or organisation.

This isn’t about abandoning personal branding at all. Rather, it’s about ensuring that if you do engage with personal branding, it emerges organically from a well-developed professional identity. When your professional presence – whether online or in-person – reflects your actual values, skills and expertise (including the areas where you’re still growing), you eliminate a major source of imposter syndrome.

The question isn’t whether to build a personal brand, but how to build one that’s grounded in reality. When your brand emerges from genuine capability and authentic professional identity, you can stop worrying about being “found out” and focus on what really matters – creating value and making an impact. After all, the most compelling personal brands aren’t built on perfection. They’re built on authenticity, including the courage to be honest about where we’re still growing.

‘Massive warning sign’: Marketers on the ‘seismic’ scale of imposter syndrome

Here are three small ways to start understanding your professional identity:

1. Notice your natural strengths. Jot down three moments where work felt effortless. Not because it was easy, but because you were using skills that come naturally to you. This helps identify part of your core skillset.

2. Reflect on your professional perspective. In your next meeting, what’s the unique angle you bring? Maybe you spot patterns others miss, or you think about the human impact, or you see commercial opportunities. Understanding your natural viewpoint is part of your professional identity.

3. Consider your consistent threads. What do colleagues or clients consistently come to you for? Not just tasks, but the type of thinking or approach you bring. This reveals aspects of your professional identity that you might take for granted.

These actions help build awareness of your existing professional identity. But here’s the truth: you already have a professional identity. It’s not something you need to manufacture, perform or polish for LinkedIn. It’s woven into every decision you make, every perspective you bring, even the mistakes you learn from and the challenges you navigate.

Understanding this identity brings clarity – the kind that fuels genuine self-belief. When you build from that foundation, you develop something powerful: a quiet, unshakeable confidence that no imposter gremlin can argue with.

Laura Chamberlain is an award-winning professor at Warwick Business School, a marketer, career strategist and coach. She is also founder of self-development consultancy Think Talk Thrive.