Your brand isn't your logo or your Instagram

When I ask a room of beauty professionals to tell me about their personal brand, almost everyone starts with their Instagram, and a few brave souls mention their logo or the colours they chose for their business cards. I understand why, because those are the parts you can see (and usually the parts somebody charged you for), but they're a pretty small slice of what people are actually judging you on.

Your brand is every moment someone experiences you. It's the DM you took four days to answer, the way your name gets read out before you walk on stage, the invoice that arrived with last year's pricing on it, and the comment you made about another educator at an expo dinner that somehow found its way back to her by Monday. People are forming an opinion of you at every one of those moments, whether or not you've decided what you'd like that opinion to be.

At my first Personal Branding Intensive, one of the exercises we worked through was a single wheel with your name in the middle and eight parts of your brand around the outside. I'm sharing it here, section by section, so you can run the same audit on yourself.

What you stand for

This covers your point of view, the principles you work by, the causes you back, and the one almost everybody skips, which is what you say no to. It sits first on the wheel because every other section takes its cue from it, and when it's missing, the rest of your brand ends up borrowing its personality from whatever everyone else in the industry is doing that month.

If you can't say what you believe that another educator or clinic owner might disagree with, you don't have a point of view yet, you have a service list. The things you turn down (the brand whose claims you don't trust, the discount you won't run, the client you won't take on) often say more about you than the things you promote.

How you teach

Your curriculum, your class run sheet, your slides, your workbooks, your certificates, and whatever happens after class has finished all belong here. For anyone who educates, this is where your brand is felt most deeply, because a student spends a whole day inside it rather than thirty seconds scrolling past it.

The certificate is the thing that ends up framed on a treatment room wall, and the follow-up email is usually what decides whether someone books your next class or drifts off to somebody else's. If your slides look like they were borrowed from a brand deck you presented in 2019, your students will notice, even if they're too polite to say so.

How you show up online

Your Instagram bio, your pinned posts, your captions and stories, your LinkedIn, your website, and your newsletter make up the part most people think is the entire brand. It matters enormously, and it's still only one eighth of the wheel.

The most common problem I see is that each of these tells a slightly different story. Your bio says you're a skin specialist, your LinkedIn still says salon manager, your website hasn't been touched since you opened, and your newsletter went out twice in 2024 and then stopped. None of those is a disaster on its own, but together they make you harder to describe, and people who are hard to describe are pretty hard to recommend.

How you sell

This is your sales page, your pricing, your checkout, your payment plans, your proposals, your invoices, and your contracts. Most of us rush this part because talking about money feels uncomfortable, which is exactly why it's so often the moment a beautiful brand falls over.

Someone can love everything you post and still lose confidence in you when the price list is a blurry screenshot, the checkout link is broken, or the proposal arrives as a plain email with no structure to it. The way you ask for money tells people how seriously you take your own work, so it deserves the same care as your content.

How you communicate

Your email sign-off, your welcome email, your DMs, your reminder texts, your voicemail, and your response time are all brand, even though nobody designs them in a studio. Response time in particular is one of the most honest signals you send, because it shows people how much room you have for them.

Read your last ten DMs and emails back as if you were the person receiving them. If your Instagram voice is warm and funny and your inbox reads like a terms and conditions page, the person on the other end is meeting two different people, and they'll trust neither of them as much as they could.

How you appear

Headshots, photography, what you wear, how you speak, your speaker bio, and how you're introduced all sit in this section. I've always said that your personal brand can come right down to your wardrobe, and I mean that in the most practical sense, because people remember what they saw long after they've forgotten what you said.

The one I'd look at first is how you're introduced. If you haven't written the paragraph an MC reads out before you walk on stage, somebody else will write it for you from whatever they could find online, and it probably won't be the version of you that you'd have chosen.

Who you're seen with

Your brand partners, your collaborations, the podcasts you appear on, the panels you sit on, your testimonials, and your associations all shape how people see you, because they borrow meaning from the company you keep. Standing next to the right brand tells people what you're for, and it puts you in front of that brand's audience at the same time.

That's why I always encourage people to choose the partner whose customers are the audience they want, rather than the one that happens to pay the most this quarter. Every logo you stand beside becomes part of your story, so it's worth being as deliberate about it as you are about your own.

How you treat people

The last section is your after-care, the way you thank people for referrals, how you handle complaints, how you say no, and how you talk about your peers. It's the section that never makes it into a brand guidelines document, and it's the one this industry talks about the most.

Professional beauty is a small world where everyone is about two conversations away from everyone else, so the way you treat a junior therapist, a brand rep, or an unhappy client travels much further than any post you'll ever write. You can have the most beautiful Instagram in Australia and still lose the room because of how you spoke about someone at an event.

Now audit your own wheel

Go around all eight sections and circle the three touchpoints that don't feel like you yet, the ones where someone experiencing that moment wouldn't be able to tell it came from you. Please don't try to fix everything at once, because a brand gets built by making three things sharper and then choosing the next three, not by rebuilding the whole wheel in a weekend.

Most people who do this are surprised to find that their weakest touchpoints aren't online at all. They're sitting in an invoice template, a welcome email nobody had looked at in two years, or a speaker bio that still described the job they'd left. Those are some of the easiest wins you'll ever get, because nobody else is paying attention to them either.

This is really what It's Personal (Brand) is about. Your brand isn't something you post, it's something people experience, and once you start seeing every one of those moments as part of it, you get to decide what people take away from them.

If you'd like to know which part of your brand is holding you back right now, I built a short diagnostic called the A-List that shows you exactly where your gap is, along with what to do about it.

Take the A-List quiz