Should you build your personal brand with more expertise or personality?

All personal brands are made up of two core attributes…expertise & personality.

• Kylie Jenner’s personal brand is more personality than expertise. She still has expertise in her space, but her content relies much more heavily on her personality to accrue trust.

• Alex Hormozi’s personal brand is more expertise than personality. He still has a personality, but his content relies much more heavily on his expertise to accrue trust.

I call this the Expertise-Personality Split.

Think of every personal brand like a pie chart with some amount of each attribute (it’s extremely rare for someone to be 100/0 in either direction).

Now here’s why this matters…

Depending on your industry and business model, certain audiences reward specific personal brand mixes over others.

So the goal, if you’re building a personal brand to drive leads for your business, is to design your content mix, format selection, and content strategy to execute against the optimal mix for your business.

Here’s a cheat sheet breaking down the optimal ratios…

DFY Services Agency

The optimal mix is 75% expertise // 25% personality.

If you’re selling services, the most important thing you can put in front of a buyer is a demonstration of your ability and results.

An ads agency founder who posts screenshots of ROAS and client case studies will always outperform one who's posting their morning coffee order. Your customers don’t care if you take 2 creams or drink straight motor oil, they just want to know if you can get them an ROI.

Personality doesn't really move the needle in service businesses, but it becomes useful once you're competing against 10 other agencies who all get a consistent 3x ROAS. Coffee still isn’t how you do it, but 25% of your content should infuse your core values or storytelling content that builds you into a likable character.

Consumer Products

The optimal mix is 10% expertise // 90% personality.

Consumer product purchases are almost all vibes, which means the emotional pull of liking someone matters much more than trusting their expertise.

Usually, you don’t buy a hoodie from someone because of their extensive knowledge of clothing manufacturing and fabrics. You buy it because you want to mimic the lifestyle and vibe of the brand, and hope/expect the product to be quality.

This is why Kylie Jenner over-indexing on personality in cosmetics works so well. People don’t care how good she is at formulating makeup. You buy Kylie Cosmetics because you want to look like Kylie Jenner. 

The exception is any category where an authority figure functions as proof (wellness being the clearest example) since credentials there correlate proportionately with product safety.

The Farmer’s Dog borrows the authority of veterinarians on the expertise side, but also borrows the likeness of celebrities like Oprah on the personality side to sell their dog food.

Software

The optimal mix is 80% expertise // 20% personality.

It's nearly impossible to win the software game on personality alone.

You might be able to drive a ton of top funnel, trials, and first month subscriptions, but retention and sticky customer behavior will not come from pure personality content. 

Typically software, especially B2B SaaS, is based on the demonstration of the software and the direct tie to a core customer outcome in the content.

But having a personality infused on top of the content is helpful in certain categories.

@denk_tweets from beehiiv is a good example of this mix executed well: his expertise carries the weight, but his personality is what separates him once the category gets crowded and features start to blur together.

Media

The optimal mix is 20-50% expertise // 50-80% personality.

Media is the category that has a high variability because there’s different types of media presences online. You’ve got 2 primary categories that behave differently:

• Deep education or category news – You’re going to want to fall at 50-50. You have to be likeable but also trustworthy

• Entertainment or lifestyle – You’re going to fall at 80% personality and 20% expertise, because the audience is optimizing for enjoyment over education

Info Products/Coaching

The optimal mix is 65% expertise // 35% personality.

Expertise gets you in the door, but as it turns out, once a category gets commoditized and 10 other people are teaching the same skill at a similar level, people stop buying based on credentials and start buying from who they like.

Bottom line is: when you start building a personal brand, it's important to think about your split based on what you're trying to build. 

For example: personally, I've built my personal brand almost entirely expertise based.

I've intentionally shielded almost all of my "external personality" from content for privacy reasons, which is why I don't film content about my life or travels, etc.

That works for me given the categories I’ve chosen (Media, SaaS, Info), but the negative tradeoff of this is that I cannot easily monetize in certain categories as well as other creators. For example, consumer products would be difficult for me because I haven’t accrued audience equity around my personality.

The beauty of content is that there are a million ways to win, you just need to pick what resonates most with your creative tilt and start posting.

If you’re stuck overthinking, start with the business model and audience avatar you're building for, then work backward to define your mix. Most people do this in the wrong direction and they end up building an audience that never converts into buyers.

Keep going 🫡

PS - If you’re ready to start scaling your personal brand, and you want me to personally review your content strategy and give your 1:1 video feedback, reply back with “Scale”