For many IP experts, the hesitation around personal branding begins long before the question of what to post on LinkedIn or how to improve a profile.

It begins with the term itself.

“Personal branding” can sound uncomfortably close to self-promotion: putting yourself at the centre, making claims about your expertise, cultivating visibility for its own sake. In professions built around precision, objectivity and responsibility, that can feel at odds with what it means to be a serious expert.

This discomfort is worth taking seriously because it reveals something important about how many experts understand professional credibility.

Their reputation has often been built through the quality of their work, recommendations from trusted peers and clients, years of experience and the ability to deliver when the stakes are high. From that perspective, actively shaping how others perceive your expertise can seem unnecessary at best and self-serving at worst.

Yet the market around that expertise has changed.

Prospective clients encounter experts through many more touchpoints before they ever experience their work directly. They read profiles and articles, listen to conference contributions, see comments on professional developments, receive recommendations and compare firms and individuals online. Increasingly, they also encounter AI-generated summaries and other forms of automated information that make expertise easier to access, but potentially harder to distinguish.

This means that professional reputation is no longer shaped only by what you do. It is also shaped by how clearly others can understand what you stand for, where your expertise becomes particularly valuable and how you approach the questions that matter to them.

And this is where the discomfort around personal branding becomes strategically interesting.

Perhaps the problem is not the principle, but the language

If “building a personal brand” feels artificial, I would not advise an expert to become more comfortable with self-promotion. I would question whether self-promotion is the right interpretation in the first place.

A more useful question is: What should clients understand about your professional value before they have worked with you?

That changes the task considerably.

For a patent attorney, the answer might be that clients should recognise an ability to connect protection strategy with commercial decisions around a new technology. For another expert, it may be the ability to bring structure to an international portfolio when business priorities are changing. For someone else, it may be a particular understanding of an industry that allows legal and technical issues to be assessed in their commercial context.

None of these require inflated claims. They require professional clarity. The challenge is to identify which aspects of your expertise, perspective and way of working are relevant enough to become part of a recognisable position in the market—and then communicate them consistently enough for others to make that connection.

Authenticity does not mean communicating everything

One common response to the discomfort around personal branding is to avoid strategic choices altogether. Experts describe their complete range of capabilities, comment only on topics where they can remain entirely neutral or communicate in a way that could equally have come from many other highly qualified professionals.

The result may feel safe and professionally appropriate. But it often makes differentiation difficult. Authentic communication requires selection.

You do not need to manufacture a distinctive professional persona. You do, however, need to decide which part of your expertise you want the market to associate with you, which client situations you want to become relevant for and which perspective you can credibly contribute to the conversations around them. That selection is positioning.

And positioning inevitably means leaving some things in the background, even when you are capable of doing them. This can feel uncomfortable precisely because experts are accustomed to demonstrating breadth and completeness. Yet clients rarely need to understand everything you know in order to recognise when they should involve you. They need enough clarity to make the right association.

From visibility to recognisable counsel

This distinction becomes increasingly important as expert markets become more crowded and more information becomes available through technology.

When factual knowledge and competent explanations become easier to access, communicating more information will not necessarily strengthen an expert’s position. What becomes more valuable is a recognisable professional perspective: the ability to show which issues deserve attention, how different considerations connect and where expertise can influence a consequential decision.

For IP experts, this is where personal branding matures into something much more relevant to business development.

It becomes part of the trust infrastructure around the expert.

A clear position helps prospective clients understand where your expertise fits before a mandate exists. Consistent communication allows them to become familiar with how you think before they sit across the table from you. A coherent narrative across your profile, articles, presentations, conversations and firm communication reinforces the same professional associations over time.

That does not replace reputation built through excellent work. It helps that reputation travel further than the people who have already experienced it.

This is also why discomfort should not simply be dismissed as resistance to marketing. Sometimes it is a useful signal that the language or approach being used does not fit the professional identity of the expert.

The answer is not to force experts into communication conventions that feel foreign to them. It is to translate positioning into a form that preserves professional integrity while making expertise easier for the market to recognise. Because the objective is ultimately not to become better at talking about yourself. It is to make it easier for the right clients to understand why, when and for which decisions your expertise matters.

Until then, a question to reflect on:

If personal branding feels uncomfortable to you, which part actually creates the discomfort, and what would change if you reframed it as helping the right clients recognise when your expertise matters?

About the columnist

Giulia Donato
Branding & Communication Advisor | Executive Coach | Lecturer
people & brand strategies
www.donatostrategies.com