Thought leadership and personal brand are not the same thing

Boxers & Briefs Podcast #42: Thought leadership vs personal brand: what’s the difference with Clint Griffin

Most business owners muddle up thought leadership and personal brand. They try to be all things to all people, posting whatever sounds good on LinkedIn without a clear strategy. Clint Griffin knows the difference matters.

With 30 years of strategic communications experience working with giants like Walmart and Unilever, Clint now helps Kiwi businesses develop winning communication strategies. His take on thought leadership and personal brand is straightforward. They’re distinct, they serve different purposes, and you need both.

What thought leadership means

Thought leadership is about depth. It’s the topic you know inside out, the thing you could talk about for hours without notes.

“If you’re a lawyer, there’s something about that you know. Contract law, litigation, whatever,” Clint explains. “If you’re an accountant, you know about tax or something specific. The area that you know a lot about is where you’re going to tell your thought leadership.”

It requires going deep into one narrow area. Not broad knowledge across many topics, but genuine expertise in something specific.

What personal brand means

Personal brand is bigger than thought leadership. It’s everything about you. The way you dress, the way you speak, the words you use, the things that differentiate you from someone else doing the same work.

Clint points to Donald Trump’s red tie as an example. It’s consistent, recognisable, part of the total package.

“The consistency of you is important. It’s everything you do as a person,” he says. “You can be great at thought leadership and be a terrible person. You could also be a great person who’s terrible at thought leadership. The two are quite distinct.”

The sweet spot is aligning who you want to be as a person with the thing you’re genuinely good at. Find your truth, find your purpose, align that with your expertise, and tell it deeply. That’s when you have both a strong personal brand and solid thought leadership.

Why authenticity matters for both

You can’t fake thought leadership. If you want to be a thought leader, you need to care deeply about something. You need to find the insights no one else has found, do the research, and get into the details.

“Otherwise you’re just using ChatGPT, which isn’t thought leadership,” Clint says bluntly.

The same goes for personal brand. Trying to be someone you’re not comes across as awkward. People can tell when your LinkedIn posts don’t match who you are in person.

Clint received feedback recently that someone could hear him speaking through his weekly email. That’s the goal. Consistency between who you are and what you put out there.

Getting over the self-promotion discomfort

Many business owners struggle to put themselves out there. They call it imposter syndrome, lack of confidence, or just not having time. Clint’s advice is to stop thinking about it as self-promotion.

“There’s a reason we do what we do. It’s normally in service of others, right? If you’re doing thought leadership or your personal brand to help cement why you should be listened to, you’re serving other people. You’re giving them knowledge about things they don’t know.”

When you frame it as service rather than self-promotion, the discomfort often falls away. You’re not bragging. You’re sharing knowledge that helps someone solve a problem.

What you know isn’t common knowledge

One of the biggest blocks is assuming everyone already knows what you know. They don’t.

“Start talking to people. You realise they don’t know,” Clint says. “I used to gloss over things because I assumed everyone knew. I’d see the look and the head tilt. They don’t know what I’m talking about. Okay, I need to go through it.”

Over time, you learn that what seems basic to you is news to someone else. That’s what people want. Explanation. Context. The thing you take for granted.

Finding your unique angle

Every profession has baseline knowledge that most practitioners share. What differentiates businesses is how the work gets done. That comes down to people, culture, and approach.

“There are a thousand strategists in New Zealand. I happen to do it in my own way,” Clint explains. “There are a thousand plumbers in Auckland. They happen to do it in their own way. Are they really great at communicating, or terrible communicators but really good at just being a plumber? Tell the story that you’re good at, and the people who want that will get it from you.”

Be authentic. Nobody can be you but you. Don’t try to be someone else because that’s awkward.

From restaurant owner to marketing expert

Clint worked with a restaurant owner who came to him for marketing advice. Food is easy to market. You can photograph it, it looks good, and people respond to it. But through working together, they discovered something deeper.

“We realised she wasn’t a restaurateur. She was a connector of people,” Clint says. “She was good at the food, but people came because she knew this person and that person. She’d have cocktails on Sunday and invite particular people to create connections.”

That changed everything. The restaurant was just a vehicle. She was using it to do what she really was, which was to connect people. She eventually left the restaurant business and now works as a marketing expert in Sydney.

The lesson is finding what you’re genuinely good at, not just what you happen to be doing. If you can be sketched as a caricature and everyone knows who you are, you’ve probably got your personal brand right.

The biggest mistakes in thought leadership

People take themselves too seriously. Unless you’re a heart surgeon, you’re not saving lives.

“Drop it and just go for the essence. Go for the things that are important. Make your personality shine,” Clint advises. “If you’re very serious about everything, you’re boring.”

You don’t have to be entertaining, but you don’t have to be righteous either. Just be yourself. Take the veneer off. Nobody wants the fake version.

Measuring return on investment

You won’t publish one piece of thought leadership today and have people knocking down your door tomorrow. It’s a long game.

Measure engagement. Start with quality over quantity. If one person engages with your first piece, what’s the quality of their comment? Do they get what you meant? What questions are they asking?

Watch how engagement builds over time. One person becomes two, then three, then four. Track website hits from LinkedIn engagement. Monitor social mentions. See how you show up in search results.

“Sometimes you end up with people trusting you even if they haven’t met you,” Clint notes. “They know you’re the person who does that stuff. They’ve been meaning to ask you about it when they met you.”

Write down those conversations. Otherwise, you won’t remember to count them as a metric.

Avoid vanity metrics such as likes and impressions. You can get lots of impressions by doing something stupid. Look at engagement, comments, referrals, and where people heard about you.

How much time does it take

Think of thought leadership like lifelong learning. You finished school and realised you knew nothing. You finished university and realised the same thing. If you’re going to be a thought leader, you’re going to be one forever.

It takes longer at the start because you need to find your groove. Find what works. Once you’ve found it, it becomes easier.

“Maybe sit with someone who knows what they’re doing and get some teasers out of them,” Clint suggests. “Help them help you find your spot. Eventually, a couple of hours a week will be enough.”

Once you’re in the groove, ideas will come to you in the shower or during client interactions. Something will happen and you’ll think, “That’s what I’m going to talk about this week.” It gets easier and better the more comfortable you get.

AI won’t replace thought leadership

Artificial intelligence (AI) is useful but limited. It won’t give you something new. It finds stuff that already exists and interprets it in a way that makes sense.

You can use it to write outlines, ask for topic questions, or prompt it to write in your voice if you feed it enough examples. It’s good for sense-checking work to see if you’ve missed something obvious.

“If everybody’s doing the same marketing plan, nobody’s going to be different,” Clint points out. “AI is really cool as a tool, but it’s not going to take over thought leaders. It’s not a creative tool.”

AI doesn’t have original thoughts. That still requires a human.

Everyone has something to say

Clint’s final piece of advice is simple. Everyone has something important to say. Everyone has a purpose. He believes that purpose, at its core, is to inspire people.

“You inspire someone every day of your life. There’s a person you inspire and you don’t even realise it,” he says. “Find your layer on top of that.”

That’s where thought leadership lives. In the thing only you can say, said in a way only you can say it.Boxes and Briefs is proudly brought to you by Gilligan Sheppard, the problem solvers in business.

This article and podcast is proudly brought to you by Gilligan Sheppard, the problem solvers in business who believe in thinking differently.