“Personal brand” and “personal brand management” are terms everyone uses today. Few people know where they come from. And knowing where an idea comes from helps you apply it with judgement, instead of repeating the recipe from the latest video.
I'm Nico, a freelance digital marketing consultant in Seville. I wrote this article in 2021, when I was starting to work on my own brand. Five years later it's the page with the most clicks on my website and the one that appears most in Google's AI answers. I've updated it with what I apply today in personal brand audits.
The four books at a glance
| Book | Author | Year | What it brings | Their method |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The brand called YOU (article in Fast Company) | Tom Peters | 1997 | Invents the concept: “in the age of the individual, you have to be your own brand” | 5 questions |
| Marca Personal: cómo convertirse en la opción preferente | Andrés Pérez Ortega | 2008 | The leading voice in Spanish, focused on becoming the preferred choice in a recruitment process | 3 phases |
| Me 2.0: 4 Steps to Building Your Future | Dan Schawbel | 2009 | Connects the personal brand with blogs, websites and LinkedIn | 4 steps |
| #Triunfagram: estrategias para triunfar en Instagram | Vilma Núñez | 2015 | The personal brand applied to one specific network, from day one | Practical, network by network |
The brand called YOU, Tom Peters (1997)
It all starts on 31 August 1997 in the United States. Tom Peters, a business management specialist, publishes the article “The brand called YOU” in Fast Company. The original text is still available.
His message fits in one sentence: “In the age of the individual, you have to be your own brand.” Peters notes that everything around us carries a logo. And he asks: if everything has a brand, why don't we learn from that?
That's where the idea of “Me Inc.” comes from, something like “Me Ltd”. In the job market, we are the ones offering a service to the companies that need it. It pays to know what we're offering.
Peters asks five questions:
- What makes you different?
- What's your tone?
- What's your real power?
- What does loyalty mean to you?
- What's your future?
If you've read anything about personal branding, almost all of them will seem obvious. The fourth won't. For me, this is the point most worth pausing on: how you see loyalty is one of the pillars of personal branding. What loyalty means to you at work defines what success will feel like.
Peters closes with an idea about careers that still holds: reaching the top job at a company is a career with nothing left to aim for. Instead, he suggests seeing it as moves between different projects that feed your experience.
Marca Personal: cómo convertirse en la opción preferente, Andrés Pérez Ortega (2008)
Andrés Pérez Ortega is the leading voice in personal branding in Spanish. His 2008 book develops Peters' concept with a specific goal: becoming the preferred choice in a recruitment process. It was one of the reasons I got into this. Later I discovered there was much more to it, especially the introspection part.
His method has three phases:
- Analysis: knowing who you are and what you offer.
- Differentiation: what sets you apart from the other candidates.
- Visibility: making sure whoever decides knows you before they decide.
Two of his ideas I apply today. First, that companies should support their employees' personal brands through HR, with a humanist perspective. Second, that analysis always comes first. It's the step all the authors share and the one most people skip.
Following Andrés Pérez Ortega on social media and on his website is, on its own, a training course in personal branding. For Spanish speakers, he was the first to work on these concepts in Spanish and make them accessible.
Me 2.0: 4 Steps to Building Your Future, Dan Schawbel (2009)
Dan Schawbel brings personal branding into the digital world. Between Peters' article (1997) and his book (2009) there were other authors, but “Me 2.0” is the one that links professional development with blogs, websites and social media. Schawbel later published “Promote Yourself” (2013) and “Back to Human” (2018), the latter aimed at leaders and teams, closer to HR than to personal branding.
What's surprising when you read it today is that the digital part isn't deep. It skims over the tools and stresses offline networking. He was in the right place at the right time: he saw an opportunity and wrote it down.
His four steps:
- Discover: who you are, what makes you unique, your mission and your values.
- Create: the tools that support your brand. Blog, website and LinkedIn.
- Communicate: content, exchanges with other professionals, events.
- Maintain: the presence you've built, which is the hardest part.
His most useful concept is consistency across profiles: same name, same photo, same message on every platform. It's the first thing I check in a personal brand audit and the thing that fails most often.
#Triunfagram: estrategias para triunfar en Instagram, Vilma Núñez (2015)
When it comes to personal branding, there are thousands of examples before this one. “#Triunfagram” is about Instagram, not about the concept. I include it for what it represents: the full digitalisation of the personal brand, within reach of anyone with a profile.
From the start, Vilma Núñez shared what she knew about the 2.0 world and the tools she used. Her ebook came out when I was training in social media, and her resources complemented the classes I was taking at the time with Keka Sánchez and Teresa Suárez.
The book's approach is to rebuild. Whoever picks it up wants to succeed on Instagram without knowing anything about personal branding. Starting from something they already have, a profile, they begin to build an image and a strategy, and to understand how much digital can matter to their career. Later, Núñez expanded her courses to every network.
In Spain, figures such as Keka Sánchez, TreceBits, José Facchin and Borja Girón brought that knowledge to anyone who wanted to get started. Me included.
Five questions, four steps and three phases: they're the same path
The three methods overlap more than you might think.
| Peters (5 questions) | Schawbel (4 steps) | Pérez Ortega (3 phases) | What you do in practice |
|---|---|---|---|
| What makes you different? What's your power? What does loyalty mean to you? | Discover | Analysis | Write, on one page, who you are, what you offer and to whom |
| What's your tone? | Create | Differentiation | Choose the message, the name and the channels, the same everywhere |
| What's your future? | Communicate and maintain | Visibility | Publish, talk to people and keep it going over time |
Peters' questions fit into Schawbel's first step. Schawbel's “create”, “communicate” and “maintain” are Pérez Ortega's search for “differentiation” and “visibility”. One describes what you do at each step; the other, what you're after with it. Both lead to the same place.
What I apply today, five years on
I stand by what I said in 2021: what matters most is staying human. Tools help you grow professionally, but the brand comes from who you already are, not the other way round.
Since then I've done more than five personal brand audits for professionals. The most common failing is the one Schawbel pointed out: profiles that don't match each other. A different name on each network, a different photo, a different message. Before publishing anything, that needs fixing. It's part of the digital presence audit and, when imagery is needed, of the branding and visual identity work.
And a figure from my own website. In 2026, this article is the URL with the most clicks on auvenico.es: 9 clicks and 596 impressions between 30 July and 24 September, at an average position of 15.8. Between 14 June and 13 September it appeared 139 times in Google's AI answers. A 2021 piece about four books is still bringing people in. I explain how that's measured in how to show up in ChatGPT and Google's AI as a small business.
If you're interested in the debate on how to train in this field, I've written another piece on digital marketing training. And if you want to work on your personal brand with a method, the first step is my free Diagnostic Session: 30 minutes, prepared in advance.
I'll finish with the Tom Peters question that the other leading voices don't tackle as directly: what does loyalty mean to you? Anyone who wants to build their personal brand, young or not so young, should answer it first.
Sources
- Tom Peters, “The brand called YOU”, Fast Company, 31-08-1997: https://www.fastcompany.com/28905/brand-called-you
- Andrés Pérez Ortega, “Marca Personal: cómo convertirse en la opción preferente”, ESIC Editorial, 2008: https://www.andresperezortega.com/libros/marca-personal
- Dan Schawbel, “Me 2.0: 4 Steps to Building Your Future”, Kaplan Publishing, 2009: https://books.google.com/books/about/Me_2_0.html?id=re4rAQAAIAAJ
- Vilma Núñez, “#Triunfagram: estrategias para triunfar en Instagram”, 2015: https://vilmanunez.com/triunfagram-estrategias-para-triunfar-en-instagram-e-book-y-curso-online/
- Own data: Search Console for auvenico.es (performance 30-07 → 24-09-2026 and generative AI report 14 Jun → 13 Sep 2026).
Freelance digital marketing consultant in Seville. I work on the digital presence of professionals and small businesses with one simple principle: your website as your operations hub. Building websites, doing SEO and running social media with my own hands since 2018.
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