This isn’t my usual type of post, it started as a small observation that turned into a much bigger question. It started with a conversation that made me think differently about personal branding, influence and what people are really buying online.

Curious to know if you’ve noticed this online too.

A year ago, I went to an event, feeling stuck and needing a spark of inspiration. I wanted to step out of my comfort zone, meet new people, but mostly hear how others had built their businesses.

At the end of the talks, I introduced myself to one of the speakers and asked following up question from her talk. She asked what I did, and I told her I was a copywriter. Her immediate response was, “Oh I just fired one, I might need one, but I don’t want one, I’ll just use ChatGPT.”

And I was a little taken back, but it didn’t surprise me. A lot of people don’t fully understand the role of copywriting in business.

Later, I looked her up online and checked out her socials and website.

She had a big audience.

Great engagement.

Strong messaging.

Videos of her speaking on podcasts, giving business advice, showing her lifestyle, inviting women who want to change their life into her world.

So I took a look at the course on her website and had a passing thought, it made me question what people were really paying for.

The algorithm rewards visibility, and visibility often gets mistaken for credibility. The more viral videos you have, the more authority people assign to you online. And some people (not all) are rewarded by the algorithm and become the most credible by default.

Not necessarily because they're the most knowledgeable or qualified, but because repeated exposure creates familiarity, influence and trust. Repeated exposure has a way of convincing you that you arrived at your own conclusions.

I love this quote from Justine’s post, it explains this idea well:

Your brain can no longer tell the difference between what you want and what you’ve simply been shown enough times. Just a week ago, you didn’t wake up wanting that expensive water bottle or the newest beauty treatment, but after four TikToks, you’re considering it, and after 8 you’re fully able to justify the cost and chalk it up to “treating yourself”. This isn’t happening because you made a conscious decision to abandon your own desires, but because repeated exposure on your timeline, whether it’s seeing the same bags, routines, or products sold back to you by different people, has a way of morphing into an desire that you believe you came up with on your own. Suddenly, wanting these thing turns into to needing these thing to acquire a lifestyle that will be used to prove that you are in fact: happy, successful, or part of the “in crowd”.

That resonated with me because it isn’t just true for products. It’s true for expertise too. The more often we’re exposed to the same people, the more authority we assign to them, regardless of where that authority actually comes from.

The same could be said with knowledge, because people aren’t only buying items anymore.

They’re buying perceived authority, identity, community, access, lifestyle and belonging.

We’re no longer just consuming information, we’re consuming people, their opinions, frameworks and suddenly their recommendations start to feel like our own conclusions.

So now people pay for people.

And maybe that’s why influencer marketing and personal branding feel more important than ever now. The internet culture has made information so accessible, because information is not enough to make people buy anymore.

Anyway a year later, while scrolling, I came across a video from someone who had taken her course and was dissatisfied with it.

In the video, she spoke about how the information inside felt generic, recycled and so obviously ChatGPT-generated that she could’ve made most of it herself for free.

Another regretted buying a digital product that had no content inside, when he mentioned his concerns to the support team, he was ignored and then after more research he noticed the many poor reviews on Trust Pilot.

And to be clear, I don’t even think using AI is the main issue.

I think AI can be an incredible tool for helping people structure, organise and refine ideas. But your knowledge, perspective and lived experience still have to exist inside the work.

Otherwise what are people really paying for?

Despite that, the course still sells.

And that’s what confirmed my original thought.

If the product itself isn’t exceptional, what are people buying?

It’s having proximity to:

The person.

Their identity.

Their beliefs.

Their lifestyle.

Proximity provides a feeling of transformation and a community. The version of that exists once you buy into that person’s world.

This also isn’t an argument against personal branding. Some of the smartest people I’ve worked with have built incredible businesses by generously sharing what they know. Marketing helps great ideas travel further.

I think it’s worth remembering, though, that visibility and credibility aren’t always the same thing. Sometimes they overlap beautifully. Sometimes they don’t. The thing is, the algorithm doesn’t know the difference.

I also think about how the same algorithm that convinced you to want a course you didn't know existed a week ago is the same one, that convinced that same dissatisfied buyer she needed a transformation in the first place.

It's not just that we're buying proximity to a person instead of a product. It's that we no longer fully trust ourselves to know which one we actually wanted.

The algorithm doesn't just shape what we buy. It shapes what we believe we're missing.

I'm not the only one who's noticed this. A few weeks ago I came across another Substack writer putting it into words better than I could.

“Somewhere along the way, we stopped knowing what we actually like. We don’t trust our own opinions anymore. We wait for the algorithm to tell us what’s ‘worth it’, for influencers to validate our choices, for TikTok to turn something into a trend before we dare admit we enjoy it.”

Which makes me wonder: if everyone has access to the same tools, the same prompts and the same information, will the internet keep rewarding the people who know how to promote themselves best?

probably, but that’s not the only issue.

It’s that we’ve lost the ability to separate our own thoughts from constant input and comparison. So when someone sells us a course, a community, a version of themselves, we’re not always asking, ‘how does this serve me?’.

We’re asking, does everyone else seem to think this is might be the answer?

Maybe the solution isn’t another framework to optimise ourselves, but something far less obvious. To stop watching long enough for your own preferences to resurface, before the internet showed you what they should be (I'm guilty of this too, so this is just as much a reminder to myself as it is to anyone else.)

If we’re constantly being shown what to admire, buy, and aspire to, how much of what we call our own opinion is actually ours?

As consumers, we’re always being sold to. Which is why it feels more important than ever to do our own due diligence. Follow people whose work can be verified, whose ideas are grounded in experience and whose knowledge exists beyond the algorithm.

When we’re following the algorithm, we’re not always choosing anymore. We’re curating ourselves from other people’s feeds. The internet has made us hyperaware of ourselves inside it, constantly measuring, comparing and consuming.

The real challenge isn’t learning more. It’s knowing which voices deserve your attention and making enough space to hear your own.

And I smiled in agreement. As I sat with it, reading the comments, the sentiment is most of us are carrying the same ache.

Millennials are the most nostalgic generation, we are homesick for a place that doesn’t exist, because it wasn’t a place, it was a time. A time with perfect amount of social media, burned CD’s, local shows and real human connection.

The amount of engagement these types of posts receive is a collective exhale from a generation who realised the future they’d been sold wasn’t the one they were living. There’s a longing.

Rewatching old shows, revisiting old playlists, returning to films they haven’t thought about in years.

Which is something I realised I do every once in a while, I don’t even mind the standard definition quality. I find the little fuzz comforting in a way.

Mainly because the nostalgia trend isn’t just a moment, it’s a mood. When the present feels heavy, the past feels like somewhere safe to visit.

I think it’s because life right now feels like a lot. And that gap between expectation and reality is where nostalgia lives.

Two things are at the heart of this

The first is technology. Our screen times and addiction to social media are at an all-time high. We’re all exhausted by and it’s no coincidence that searches for “analog hobbies” have increased in recent months. The lives people are longing for are ones that feel more present and more disconnected from social media.

The second is the cost of living. There’s something called the Carrie Bradshaw Index, a measure of what it takes to live alone the way the Sex and the City protagonist did. In most major cities, the median wage falls short. The futures we were promised, the home or apartment, the stability, the ease, aren’t easily attainable for most of us.

Even though technically nostalgia marketing trend has existed for decades, it’s become the emotional undercurrent driving one of the biggest trends in marketing right now.

How nostalgia works

When something triggers a nostalgic memory, it activates the same part of the brain responsible for emotion and decision-making. It creates an instant sense of warmth, trust and safety.

In a culture where advertising feels relentless, emotionally charged and impossible to escape, familiarity and warmth have become more powerful than brands realise.

That’s part of why nostalgia works so well.

It offers temporary relief from the intensity of everything else competing for our attention.

2026 compared to 2016, feels like a high-pressure environment where:

• consumers are exhausted

• attention is carefully curated

• familiarity feels safer than novelty

• and the internet feels less human by the day

Researchers have also found that nostalgia increases a sense of social connectedness. It reminds people of who they were, who they loved and what mattered to them.

That’s why 2016 has become a viral reference, it was a time before everything became optimised.

When a brand can tap into that feeling, it creates belonging. And belonging is one of the most powerful things your messaging can create.

The numbers don’t lie

It’s more than a feeling and the data backs it up.

Research from GWI found that Gen Z are the most nostalgic generation, with 50% feeling nostalgic for older types of media, and millennials close behind at 47%.

And after the last few years, younger generations in particular are looking back to simpler times for comfort and escape.

There’s actually a word for the ache of longing for a time you never even lived through, anemoia.

• Nostalgia-related hashtags on TikTok have over 3.2 trillion views in a single year, a 130% year-on-year increase.

• Nostalgic content is shared at more than twice the rate of non-nostalgic branded content.

• 75% of consumers say they are more likely to buy when an ad evokes nostalgia.

As one of the most commercially effective strategies in marketing right now. And brands have started responding to it.

• Coach's brought back its Y2K silhouettes and early-2000s aesthetics, tapping into a generation’s memory of what once felt aspirational.

• Kayali uses scent as memory. Each fragrance is designed to pull you back into a specific feeling, place, or moment in time.

• Spotify built entire “Time Capsule” playlists curated from your teenage years.

• Levi’s brought back classic ads, starring Beyoncé.

• Calvin Klein’s campaigns went viral twice, by nodding to their iconic 90s aesthetic.

• Justin Bieber at Coachella had a microphone and a laptop, playing his old songs karaoke-style, singing along with his younger self. It was deep and did what an over the top elaborate production couldn’t.

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What this means for you

Most people read about nostalgia marketing and assume it's only for big brands with heritage and history behind them. The ones who can point to a logo from the 1950s or run a "back to basics" campaign with a seven-figure budget.

At its core, nostalgia marketing works because it makes people feel something real. It’s strategic because it creates recognition.

For your business, this means asking: what feeling are you actually selling?

Not what service you offer, but what emotional state does your client arrive at after working with you?

Clarity? Relief? Confidence? Ease?

Choose a feeling to anchor your messaging in.

1. Speak to where your client has been, not just where they want to go.

Most marketing focuses on the destination, the transformation and result.

But nostalgia reminds us that people are also moved by recognition of where they’ve come from. The struggle they’ve experienced, the version of themselves they’re trying to leave behind.

When your copy acknowledges the journey, not just the outcome, it creates the same warmth as a nostalgic reference. It says, I see where you’ve been. I understand what that felt like and I know what’s possible.

2. Use specificity the way nostalgia does.

One of the reasons nostalgia is so powerful is specificity. You didn’t just watch “an old TV show.” You remember Sunday evenings, X Factor playing in the background, sitting on a leather sofa with your family.

Specificity in your messaging does the same thing. The more precisely you can name what your client is experiencing, the more it feels like recognition.

3. Let your origin story do some of the work.

Nostalgia marketing works in part because heritage builds trust. The idea that something has been here, has stood the test of time.

You have that too. Your journey to doing this work, the road you took to get here. The things you figured out the hard way, because that’s not just backstory.

And when you share that, it creates the same sense of earned credibility that nostalgia creates for legacy brands.

The bigger picture

The nostalgia trend isn’t about the past. It’s about what people want right now, something that feels real in a world that doesn’t. We are exhausted of being targeted by advertising.

Because so much of what we see now is performance. We’re saturated by it.

Everything is either optimised, targeted or measured.

Your messaging can do that without a heritage campaign or a throwback logo. It has to be honest and rooted in something true.

Which brings us back to that question: “Where was the adulthood that was promised to us?”

Maybe what we’re really noticing is the distance between expectation and experience. And nostalgia is where we go to close it. Not as escapism, but as a way of remembering what it felt like when life didn’t feel so complicated.

“It’s good to be better, but it’s better to be different.”
— Sally Hogshead

That’s not just a cliche. Positioning doesn’t turn you into someone new. It takes the traits you already have and makes them the focus, noticing what’s already there and choosing to say it with purpose.

Clients I’ve worked with, have used the ‘professional but personable’ language. Then something interesting happens during a call, as they answer my questions, they say the real thing.

The reason clients trust them.

The thing they obsess over.

What their customers rave about.

The way they approach their work differently.

And the second we put words to that, everything else starts to click into place, and the copy starts to take shape.

What positioning is

The textbook definition comes from marketing professor Philip Kotler, who described positioning as creating a distinct place for your brand in the mind of the customer.

It’s deeper than the impression people leave with after encountering your business, but what people associate you with. When people think of Dyson, they think innovative home appliances with sleek design and premium engineering.

Strong positioning does four jobs at once:

1. Sets you apart

2. Makes your value clear

3. Makes you recognisable

4. Gives people something to connect with

Why it matters more when you’re the brand

It answers the questions your audience is already asking before they say them out loud. Why you and why now.

Big companies have years in the game, huge marketing budgets and large teams. Small business owners don’t.

Your positioning lives in your voice, client experience, website, captions, emails and presence.

Strong positioning creates clarity. Not just for your audience, but for you.

Which is why weak positioning can feel exhausting, if you haven’t fully decided what you want to be known for yet. Once you do, positioning becomes much easier to break down.

The four things strong positioning usually needs

• Who it’s for. The specific person you’re the obvious choice for.

• The category you’re in. What kind of thing you are, so people can place you.

• Your point of difference. The reason someone picks you over the next option.

• Your reason to believe. The proof that makes the difference credible.

Let’s work through your points of difference

Read through this list slowly.

Pick the three that feel most true to how you work and what you stand for.

Choose what feels most true to your business

Price point. Value for money. Niche specialism. Expertise. Years of experience. What you stand for. What you stand against. Over-delivery. Customer service. Unique service. Brand story. Personal experience. Attention to detail. Heritage. Innovation. Signature method. Signature philosophy. Convenience. Simplicity. Higher quality. Serving an unmet need. Brand promise. Guarantees. Slow, custom service. Brand values. Results.

The strongest positioning traits are specific enough to narrow you down.

Remember what Sally Hogshead when she said, different doesn’t try to turn you into something else. You’re identifying what’s already there and choosing to communicate it deliberately.

Don’t pick your three words and leave them in a notes app. Your positioning only works if it shows up across your marketing consistently.

The main way brands position themselves

Most brands lean heavily on one or two positioning angles rather than trying to do everything at once. The more things you want to be known for, the harder it becomes for people to remember any of them.

There’s no single right way to position, just the main one that fits what you do. Most brands lean on one or two of these rather than all of them:

• Value based. You offer the best worth for the money. Think IKEA, affordable and practical without feeling cheap.

• Story based. People choose you because of what you stand for.

• Quality based. You win on craft and durability, the way heritage watchmakers trade on being built to last.

• Innovation based. You lead on doing something new, like Dyson turning ordinary appliances into design objects.

• Price based. You sit clearly at one end of the scale, either the most accessible option or the most premium.

• Service based. You focus on how well you look after people, the route a lot of software brands take.

You can even use your three to help define your content pillars for social media, but lean into one main one.

Where your positioning lives

Positioning can live almost anywhere you communicate. But it has to start somewhere.

Your bio and your website. The most obvious place, sometimes the most neglected. Your three points of difference should be felt in how you introduce yourself, not listed like a CV/resume. The reader should finish your website knowing exactly who you are and why you’re different.

The way you talk about your work on social. Every post is a positioning touchpoint. If your difference is your signature method, talk about your process. If your difference is emotional storytelling, let people feel that consistently in your writing. Your content should feel like a natural extension of those three words, not disconnected thoughts posted at random.

Your client conversations. When a potential client asks what makes you different, that answer should come out easily and consistently, because you’ve already done the work to find it.

The words you keep coming back to. Once you know your positioning, you'll notice yourself naturally returning to certain themes, phrases, and ways of framing things. That's not repetition, it’s brand recognition.

Write your positioning sentence

Before you close this, give yourself two minutes and fill in the blanks:

For [who it’s for] who [problem or desire], I’m the [category] who [point of difference], because [reason to believe].

It doesn’t have to be perfect, but specific enough that nobody else in your industry could copy and paste it as their own.

Final thoughts

Strong positioning doesn’t change the substance of what you do. It changes how clearly people understand and remember it.

That’s why the strongest brands don’t feel like they’re trying too hard. They know what they’re known for and reinforce it consistently across everything they do.

Recently I watched The Devil Wears Prada 2, I enjoyed it and it gave me all the feels the first one did. I love a sequel with an empowering story. Andy reconnected with Miranda, showed up as a refined writer and more sure of herself. And Miranda was well, still Miranda.

Before I watched the movie, I saw a lot of comments saying she’d lost her edge. That she was softer now, less cut-throat than the woman we watched in 2006.

But I saw it differently.

Twenty years have passed. She’s elevated, senior and running a magazine in an industry that’s completely changed. Her energy is different because her position is different. She’s also working inside a culture that no longer lets anyone speak the way they did in 2006, and she’s adjusted the way anyone at the top of their field does.

And her not remembering Andy is genius and does enough. (I do miss the unhinged 2000s energy from films, but that’s another conversation.)

What Has Never Changed

Miranda Priestly never explains herself because she doesn’t have to. Her presence arrives before she does, the whole building reorganises itself around her. She walks into a room and everyone already knows who she is, what she stands for and what it means to be in her world.

That’s what happens when identity becomes undeniable.

She isn’t memorable because of what she does.

She’s memorable because of who she is.

And that’s exactly how strong storytelling works in business too.

The most memorable brands don’t feel manufactured, they feel embodied. People can feel when content is written to perform authority instead of communicate something real.

That’s why some brands leave a lasting impression. Nike’s belief in perseverance and pushing human potential shows up in everything from their campaigns to the athletes and stories they choose to spotlight.

Glossier built an entire beauty brand around real customer conversations and community-led storytelling.

Apple has spent decades reinforcing simplicity, creativity and innovation so consistently that people recognise the feeling of the brand before they even see the logo. Their point of view filters into everything naturally. You don’t need to be told what they believe because you can already feel it.

For small business owners especially, that’s key. You don’t need a huge audience, a perfectly curated brand or some larger-than-life personality to be memorable.

What Storytelling in Business Is

Most people hear “storytelling” and imagine they need to share a dramatic story. It’s become a buzzword and I’m tired of seeing it. I’ve even seen it described as sexy.

Storytelling isn’t about performing intimacy for attention.

It’s choosing to share parts of your journey, your perspective and your experience in a way that helps the people you want to reach feel seen in it too.

When you talk about what you do, people process it on a neurological level. Your story has to be real enough for the right people to recognise themselves inside it.

Your Brand Is Built on Three Stories

Chapter One: Your Story

This is where emotional connection begins. People connect with perspective, lived experience and the reason you see the world the way you do.

• What shaped you into the person behind the business?

• What made this work matter to you in the first place?

• What did you have to learn the hard way?

When people understand your journey, they understand your depth. They trust you because they can tell your perspective was earned. This is what most people avoid. It’s easier to talk about what you offer than it is to talk about yourself.

Chapter Two: Your Brand Story

This is where people decide whether they believe in the way you see things. Not just what you sell, but what you stand for.

• What feels non-negotiable to you?

• What belief sits underneath everything you create?

• What would never be worth compromising, even for growth?

The strongest brands are defined just as much by what they refuse to do. A lot of businesses have values written somewhere on a website, but people rarely remember stated values.

Something shifts when your beliefs come through in your messaging, the right people begin to see themselves in it and your worldview becomes something they’re a part of.

Chapter Three: Your Audiences Story

This is where storytelling starts feeling like recognition.

The brands people feel most connected to are the ones that articulate their experience better than they can themselves.

• What are they afraid of?

• What are they tired of hearing?

• What have they already tried that hasn’t worked?

• What do they want beneath the surface-level goal?

When you understand people at that depth, your messaging changes because you’re no longer trying to convince someone. You’re helping them feel understood, they read your words and think, “That’s exactly how I feel.”

Confession? Sharing my own story is something I’m still learning how to do. Not the strategy part, the personal storytelling. Chapter One has always been the hardest, but that’s my goal for the year. To get better at sharing my own stories and beliefs.

So if you’re reading this thinking it comes naturally, it doesn’t.

It’s a practice for all of us.

The Most Important Story of All

It’s the one you tell yourself about whether your voice is worth hearing in the first place.

If the story is “I’m not interesting enough,” “nobody needs to hear from me” or “I’ll share more when I’m more qualified,” that’s the story worth rewriting first.

Your story has probably been taking shape for longer than you realise. It lives in your everyday life, your perspective, the people you’ve helped and the beliefs you’ve held onto.

They may be fictional characters, but there’s something real about women who know their story and own it.

Which story does your brand need to focus on right now?

Share in the comments.

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I was watching Funny AF with Kevin Hart on Netflix and had a moment.

Waittt… do brands and comedians actually have this in common?

Anyway, it’s a competition for comedians, to find the next voice in comedy and the winner wins a chance at a Netflix special. And at one point he turns to the panel of comedians and asks: what do you think makes a great comedian?

And they agreed that point of view is the most important thing.

The brands whose content you can’t ignore have figured out the same thing every great comedian already knows. Surprisingly, I thought it would’ve been something a lot more performative like the timing, delivery or how funny the joke was.

But having a unique POV makes so much sense considering comedians share life from their specific lens and observations.

So I thought, huh, even if you’re not a comedian, the same rule applies.

Most business owners already have a strong perspective

Once you get clear on what you believe, your brand becomes more recognisable and your words connect on a deeper level. If you struggle to explain your perspective and values in a way that is relatable, it starts with getting clear on what you believe.

And this is where it gets interesting for business owners because having a POV is one thing. Knowing how it shows up in your brand is another.

Something worth differentiating is brand personality and brand values. They’re closely related, but not interchangeable.

If transparency is one of your core values, it shows up in how openly you write and how honest your opinions are. If excellence is a value, it shows up in the precision of your thinking and the quality of what you share.

Your personality is the expression, while your values are the foundation it’s built on. And when both are clear, the writing that comes out of it doesn’t just sound like you. It sounds like the most authentic version of you.

They’re both non-negotiables and the people who believe the same thing find you because of it.

A few questions to get closer to your POV

When I work with business owners on their brand voice, I usually ask a lot of questions that have nothing to do with their services or audience.

Here’s 7 questions:

1. What beliefs do you stand for?

2. What do you actually believe about your industry?

3. What frustrates you about the way things are done?

4. What comes up in conversations whether you planned it or not?

5. What themes keep showing up in the way you talk about your work?

6. What do you talk about the most? (think: pet peeves, brands you admire, people, TV shows)

7. How would someone recommend you to a friend? The one that starts with “you have to work with her because...”

Once you’ve answered these, don’t just leave them in your notes.

Start using them in your copy.

Take one belief and turn it into a post, take one theme that keeps showing up and build your content around it.

Once you have your answers, compare them against your existing content and ask yourself:

• Does this reflect what you actually believe?

• Would someone who knows you recognise this as you?

• Does it sound like the way you naturally talk about your work?

Your POV isn’t something you force into your writing, it’s where your writing should come from, through strong observations, opinions, and your unique way of seeing things.

Kevin Hart didn’t become the most recognisable comedian in the world by being the funniest person in the room. I mean he’s funny but not the funniest. The irony is that our attention spans have become more selective, not less.

People scroll past anything that sounds too generic, the people you want to reach are looking for someone who sees things the way they do. Your perspective is the thing no one else can copy. Use it, it’s your unfair advantage.

What’s something you keep noticing lately?

Drop it in the comments, I’d love to hear it. 🤎

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As a movie lover, one of my favourite ways to talk about memorable branding is through Elle Woods. Because it’s proof that personality is the thing people remember most.

I could never get tired of rewatching Legally Blonde, it’s not just a feel good movie, it’s a reminder for every woman to walk into every room exactly as she is.

Someone whose entire presence was so unapologetically hers that you knew who she was before she even opened her mouth.

Pink, passionate and completely sure of herself, in spaces that weren’t designed for her. Elle knew something that most people in business forget.

When you stop performing a version of yourself, you give yourself permission to be exactly who you are.

Most people haven’t done that yet because nobody told them it was allowed in their marketing.

Why so much content sounds the same

AI gets the blame these days but it was happening long before that. Most people have been writing professionally for so long they forgot what their actual voice sounds like. Small business owners know they should have a personality. But when it comes time to actually sound like themselves, they hold back.

What brand personality is

Brand personality comes alive in writing, visuals, tone, the way you communicate and how people experience your presence online.

When it’s consistent, people start to feel like they know you before they’ve ever worked with you. That’s what makes them feel drawn to you.

In 1997, Jennifer Aaker, a behavioural scientist at Stanford, built a framework that maps brand personality into five dimensions. For personal brands and small businesses, these three dimensions are a good starting point.

1. Sincerity

   Honest, warm, genuine, down-to-earth.

   This is the dimension built on trust, and it is the most natural fit for service businesses where the work is relational. When sincerity comes through in your writing, your reader does not feel marketed to. They feel understood.

2. Competence

   Reliable, intelligent, precise, capable.

   Your audience needs to believe you can do the job before anything else matters. Warmth and competence are not opposites. The best personal brands carry both.

3. Excitement

   Spirited, daring, full of forward momentum.

   For coaches and creatives whose work is about possibility, this is the dimension to lean into. It does not mean loud or high-energy. It means your writing always moves somewhere. No filler.

   Most strong brands sit in one dimension and borrow from one other. Knowing your combination is more useful than trying to be all three at once.

What a strong brand personality does

Brand personality isn’t about sounding good. It affects whether people remember you and trust you. It’s what makes someone choose you over another person offering the same service.

People eventually start associating your brand with a certain feeling, tone or your pov. Practically speaking, once you know your brand personality, writing copy gets easier.

You're not starting from scratch

The thing is, your personality is already there. It’s in the way you talk, in your messages and voicenotes you send to your family and friends. How you explain your work when someone asks.

The challenge is not building one from scratch. It’s identifying what already exists and naming it. So let's start there, I expanded on Aaker's original trait list in the exercise below to give you some more words to work with.

Naming your five words

Before I ask you to do anything, here are mine.

Calm. Caring. Friendly. Eloquent. Reflective.

These aren’t aspirational or who I want to be someday. They’re how I show up in my writing, client work, my process, it’s how I think. Every piece of content I create, every project I take on, runs through that filter.

If Elle Woods had a brand personality, her five words would be: relentless, warm, underestimated, unapologetic and distinctive. Before anyone believed in her, they were already true. That same unbothered certainty about who she was is what we’re after.

Now it’s your turn.

Pick 5 words that feel true or jump at you.

Choose the ones that made you pause, the words that show up in your business or personality whether you’ve named them or not.

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What to do with your words

Now that you’ve chosen your words, take a closer look at whether the real you is coming through. And ask:

• Does your current content actually reflect them?

• The way you show up online?

• Your bio?

• Your website?

If the answer is not really, that’s your starting point. Not a new strategy or a rebrand. Your chosen words become a filter, for every piece of content and copy to see what fits your brand and what doesn’t.

Consistency is where most brands can lose it

Defining your personality is one thing. But showing up with it consistently is the actual work.

That’s why having a brand voice guide is important, a reference point that captures how you sound, what to avoid and what your voice sounds like across different contexts. It helps keep your personality consistent as you grow or as you hire help.

It’s worth remembering that brand personality isn't something you define once and file away. It develops as you show up so you can better understand what resonates with your audience.

Applying the Elle Woods principle

If Elle had spent her time trying to fit in, she would’ve spent her energy becoming someone else. And she never would have known why you can’t wash a perm within 24 hours.

Her win wasn’t despite her personality, but because of it. Your brand personality is one part of your strategy.

People often confuse brand personality with brand values. Your personality is how you show up and your values are ‘your why’. That’s what the next post will be about. What brand values are, why they matter and how to define yours.

Most people spend years trying to sound credible, when the thing people remember most is usually the person behind it.

Now I want to hear from you!

Drop your 5 words in the comments. I’ll be reading every single one. 🤎

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I walked into a café and asked for a hot Spanish iced latte.

The barista looked at me.

I looked at her.

And somewhere in the awkward silence, I realised what I’d said.

That pause was long enough for me to begin rethinking all my life choices.

We both laughed.

Along with the 4 other baristas stood next to her.

Omg. All I wanted to do was curl up in a ball and hide.

She asked, which one?

I jokingly said, ‘it’s early so I need both’. I mean it was 7am and I woke up around 5.

Right after school drop-off, I sat there in disbelief.

Replaying the interaction, over and over.

It’s safe to say I was not okay.

That was early on.

I moved to Dubai 2 years ago from London, with a vision in my head.

Sunshine. A fresh start. A confident version of myself, a little more open, more spontaneous, and totally ‘cool’ with the unknown.

But that one sentence said everything about where I was.

I romanticised it, the way you do when you’re watching a movie and the main character is about to find herself again. She’s on the edge of a breakthrough, in her healing era. Then all of a sudden, she has a *main character moment*. Everything she went through in the past was about to make sense, and by the end of it she’d come out transformed.

I think I’ve watched way too many movies.

The part I didn’t expect

Before I moved, I was anxious and knew it would be a challenge. So I told myself moving was going to be like getting an upgrade. Switching out an old phone with a new one.

Hot weather, check.

Beautiful surroundings, check.

Ready for a new chapter, check.

But then how come everything felt like so much effort?

What surprised me most wasn’t the excitement of living somewhere new.

It was the grief of no longer being that person who felt familiar inside her own life. I recognised that feeling from becoming a mother. But this was different.

I could text my siblings or spend the weekend at my mum’s. Meet a friend and sit for hours talking about life, go somewhere and make a day of it.

I didn’t realise how disorienting “new” could feel. Like standing in a grocery aisle for far too long, all while calculating the conversion rate. Things that used to feel automatic suddenly started requiring thought and energy. I became hyper-aware of how I sounded, while adjusting to cultural norms.

We hear about the adventure. The opportunity. The growth.

The aesthetic Instagram-worthy moments and the sunset photos.

What people don’t really talk about is how exhausting it can feel to exist without routine. You no longer move through life on autopilot or with the same sense of ease.

Not in a dramatic way, in small, subtle moments like remembering your support system is no longer a drive or a train ride away. Or missing the ease of being somewhere that already knew you: cue the Cheers theme song, “where everybody knows your name.”

The version of yourself you think you should be

For a while, I kept wondering what was wrong with me.

Why wasn’t I thriving the way I thought I would?

Why did I miss familiarity so much?

Why did I prefer structure when I’d imagined myself becoming more spontaneous?

I kept questioning myself until I accepted the truth.

I hate change. And that’s okay.

Even though I knew it would be hard starting over, I thought I’d find romance in new beginnings.

What I didn’t expect was the gap.

Between the version of myself I’d been building in my head and the one who was still figuring it out. Sometimes we fall in love with an idea of ourselves before we’ve actually met that person.

Moving somewhere new doesn’t rewrite who you are, it just shows you more clearly who you’ve always been.

When things started to shift

Settling in didn’t happen in one moment. It happened through repetition. Making small decisions, doing the same things again and again until they stopped feeling strange.

For me, that meant getting back into client work. Cafe hopping. Decorating my home office. Evening walks. Retail therapy. Library trips with the family.

None of these things stood out at first, but slowly I realised I wasn’t just passing through, but participating as a resident.

I learned that familiarity isn’t built through big experiences. It’s built through repetition. Gradually, the place that felt strange started to feel like home. And I learnt that home isn’t a place, it’s wherever you create it.

Two years in

I won’t tell you it all clicks eventually. I’m not sure it ever does.

But something has softened.

Somewhere along the way, the life I was trying to adjust to became my actual life. I started focusing on who I was becoming. The one who was networking, socialising at events, taking better care of myself and experimenting with my style.

You can’t skip to the good part.

Not all change feels exciting at first, some of it feels like grief before it feels like growth.

The funny thing is, you don’t actually realise how much of you is tied to a place until you’re no longer in it. I'm not the person I imagined I'd become when I moved here. But I think I understand myself better than I ever did before.

Thanks for reading!

P.S. Turns out the main character moment is living life first and letting the feeling catch up later.

Writing has always been how I made sense of things. I created this space to document the journey of building a life somewhere new.

If you found this because you’re curious about life in the UAE or you’re considering a move yourself, I’ll be sharing my monthly recaps and reflections here. If that sounds like your kinda of thing, I’d love for you to stick around.

Confessions of a Copywriter is where branding meets identity, storytelling and all the things people don’t realise shape the way they communicate in their marketing. Whether you’re a founder, a coach, or someone building a business. I’ll be sharing practical tools to help you say what you do in a way that feels like you.

If anything of that interests you, subscribe!

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