Why the trust economy rewards specificity more than scale
We’ve all been told the power of a polished personal brand.
You know, colors, wardrobe, fonts, a great headshot with you in front of your laptop, maybe an inspired Instagram 9-grid.
And don’t get me wrong: I love a good aesthetic. I created Stilettos in the Sandbox. I won’t pretend I don’t enjoy a curated shoot or a signature shade of lipstick.
But let’s be clear: a personal brand isn’t about being pretty. It’s about being profitable.
And if your brand is only built to attract eyeballs, not build trust, you’re leaving credibility (and cash) on the table.
What We Got Wrong About Personal Brands
Somewhere around 2020, we all migrated online and started building personal brands.
We were posting. Growing audiences. Trying to showcase ourselves as someone who should book the part (because at least we looked the part).
And somewhere in that shift, we stopped acting like business owners and started acting like influencers.
We used MrBeast as the benchmark, thinking our content had to hit millions to matter.
Moms in business need a different blueprint.
The “be Mr. Beast” model for marketing is a fast track to burnout.
It’s time we redefined enough.91
(hat tip to Adriana Tica for the inspo)
We looked the part. Personal branding meant publishing polished websites with high-end templates (Tonic Site Shop has me in a forever chokehold).
That was enough to impress at first sight. Insert testimonial here, and a laptop photo there, and a client yelling shut up and take my money was soon to follow (I legitimately had a client find the only page I hadn’t unpublished during a rebrand and not take no for an answer when I said I’d sunset that service).
More was more. More eyeballs literally meant more money. It also meant we were in the era of “content is kingqueen.
We were told the top of our funnel should be generic, that the goal was ‘reach first, relevance second’.
And so we watered our messages down to ‘fill the top of the funnel’. We tried to appeal to more people in hopes that we’d eventually convert a few to our signature course (and we’d ride off into the sunset with pockets full of “passive income”).
But passive income was just that, “a dream.” And in the end, course creation was a dream for some course creators, but course takers not so much.
According to Harvard Business Review, online course completion rates hover around 10–15%.
That’s completion, not success. Implementation? Probably even lower.
We were promised passive income and scalable transformation. What we got was burnout, buyer regret, and Google Drives full of outdated PDFs.
And yet, we keep following formulas built for 2020 as if the market hasn’t moved on.
The Trust Economy Changed Everything
If you enjoyed the time when audience size correlated with income, you know it’s certainly not the case today. We’ve left the attention economy. In fact, organic social reach is firmly in the single-digit percentages across platforms. We’re firmly in the trust economy.
Before 2024, I felt like I could write “hello” on LinkedIn and get 800 impressions (even before I started building an audience). These days, I’m reaching for 500 impressions with an audience of 5k and a strong network that engages.
When organic reach plummets, you have two choices: pay-to-play or find your people and build trust.
Fortunately, trust is more than a mood. It’s measurable.
According to Weber Shandwick, a CEO’s reputation contributes to nearly half of both their company’s reputation (45%) and market value (44%). That’s not just optics, that’s impact.
Your personal brand doesn’t exist to make you look good. It exists to make you known, trusted, and credible to the people who are most likely to buy.
- That means choosing specificity over scale.
- That means staying consistent, even when you’d rather be quieter.
- That means showing signs of life that say: I’m here. I’m in it. I’m not going anywhere.
Because the brands we trust most?
They’re not the loudest.
They’re the ones still standing and still speaking specifically to their target audience.
When Specificity Becomes the Shortcut to Trust
Here’s how I know this works.
I love skincare. I’ll spend hours down the YouTube rabbit hole, soaking up product reviews, tutorials, and ingredient breakdowns.
And while I enjoy creators like James Welsh (his voice is a dream), when it comes to actual skin advice, I go straight to Dr. Vanita Rattan and Dr. Alexis Stephens.
