Multiplicity as a Personal Brand Strategy

There’s a certain type of restlessness that no one taught me how to sit with as a marketer: the need to make something creative, and not knowing what. 

Marketing as it stands is a very creativity-demanding job. But the current state of (high-paying) marketing jobs out there mostly consist of “growth” and “performance” and “streamlining operations”. Don’t get me wrong, these functions are some of the most crucial channels of marketing, but when you’re knee deep into your day-to-day, you start to wonder whether these are the things worth spending your precious energy on. 

If you’re like me, doomscroll on any social media platform, and you will soon be exposed to the anti-corporate propaganda that 9-5 is a prison and the only way out is a personal brand, and more social media presence. That visibility is leverage. 

And this restlessness has now manifested itself into your venture of starting a “PeRsoNal BrAnD”. And to start, you are told to have a niche, or a plan, or a format, or a hook, or a reason.

So, naturally, I did what everyone tells you to do.

I tried to think about my niche. My format. My plan. My hook. My content pillars. My repeatable point of view. My reason for existing online, apparently.

And all of it made sense in theory. I am a marketer. I understand why clarity matters. I understand why people need to know what to come to you for. I understand why positioning is important. I have literally built my career around helping brands, businesses, and ideas become easier to understand.

But when I tried to apply that same logic to myself, something did not sit right.

The Problem Was Never the Niche

For a while, I thought I was resistant to having a niche. Although, to be fair, I have absolutely used “I’m still figuring out the angle” as a very elegant disguise for avoidance. But the more I sat with it, the more I realised the problem was not the niche itself.

It felt majorly icky, because it feels like I am being asked to become less dimensional so I could become more legible. 

When I was freelancing, I did everything. Performance marketing. Content. Design. Demand generation. Campaigns. Brand thinking. Copy. Strategy. Whatever needed to be figured out, I would find a way to figure it out.

But the internet guru in linen clothes and selling a course would tell you that being able to be recognised by one focus is the key to a comfortable life with financial freedom! 

And sure, there’s power in that. 

It would be soooo amazing if everytime someone thought of “focaccia bread”, they immediately thought of you because you completed a 30-day content challenge on different focaccia flavours. Very wholesome. Very gluten-forward. Very algorithmically sensible. 

But what if you’re also really good at baking cakes! (most bread makers are good cake makers too!). Or tarts? Or what if you identify as a pastry chef?!

Breadbaking is a category. 

Pastry chefs are a world!

Clarity Is Not the Same as Reduction

I have wanted to start my own consultancy for a while now. And for a while, I kept running into the same piece of advice: niche down.

Pick a specific category of marketing. Pick a narrow service. Own one problem. Become known for one thing.

Again, I understand the logic.

It is easier to sell one thing.

It is easier to explain one thing.

It is easier to package one thing.

It is easier for the market to remember one thing.

But I kept feeling like I was being asked to build a smaller version of myself.

And maybe that works for some people. Maybe some people feel liberated by extreme specificity. Maybe they find freedom inside a tight lane.

I do not.

Because I am not trying to start an agency. I am not trying to build a content factory.

I am not trying to become “the guy who does LinkedIn carousels for SaaS founders” or “the person who writes email sequences for accountants” or whatever terrifyingly optimised internet category exists this week.

I am trying to build a consultancy around how I see.

The Best Brands Are Not Flat

The best brands are not flat. They are layered.

Aesop is not just skincare.

It is ritual. Restraint. Taste. Architecture. Language. A very specific kind of bathroom-counter intelligence. You do not just buy the hand wash. You buy the feeling that your life could be more considered if only your sink area had better typography.

Wong Kar Wai is not just romance.

He is longing. Mood. Time. Cigarette smoke. Missed chances. People brushing past each other like the universe almost said something and then changed its mind.

R.F. Kuang is not just dark academia and empire (hello?!? yellowface?!).

There is ambition. Theft. authorship. language. violence. complicity. It is about hunger, performance, proximity to power, and the grotesque little theatre of wanting to be seen as brilliant.

Eileen Gu is more than just a skier.

She is athleticism, beauty, intellect, fashion, global identity, ambition, and the strangely modern ability to become a projection screen for everyone else’s ideas about excellence.

None of these people or brands are compelling because they are simple and one-dimensional. They are compelling because they are coherent.

Simple says: one thing.

Coherent says: many things, held together by a recognisable intelligence.

That is what I am interested in. That is what human are interested in. 

Not becoming easier to categorise. But becoming harder to misunderstand.

I Know How to Position Brands. Why Is It So Hard to Position Myself?

Here is the slightly humiliating confession.

I have been trying to start this blog for three years.

Can you imagine?

Three years.

Not because I had nothing to say. That would almost be easier. I had too much to say. That was the problem.

I wanted to write about marketing. But also design. But also taste. But also AI. But also ambition. But also how people build careers. But also how brands become desirable. But also why some things feel culturally intelligent and others feel like they were approved by a committee with fluorescent lighting. And every time I tried to begin, I could hear the advice in my head.

What is your niche?

Who is this for?

What is the takeaway?

What is the point?

A very rude set of questions, made worse by the fact that they are also correct.

When you are working on someone else’s brand, these questions are useful. Necessary, even. But when you are working on yourself, they become existential. *cues the soundtrack!*

What is my niche?

Who am I for?

What do I want to be known for?

What is the point of me?

Suddenly, this is therapy wearing a blazer. And perhaps that is why it is so difficult. When you position a brand, the product does not talk back. When you position yourself, every strategic cut feels personal.

And I always come to the same conclusion…

Multifaceted Is Not Messy

I think this is where we get the whole conversation wrong.

We treat multifaceted people as if they need to be edited down. We assume someone with many interests is somehow less serious than someone who has chosen one very narrow thing and built a tiny digital kingdom around it. We assume range is a lack of discipline.

But range is not the enemy of clarity.

Lack of perspective is.

Being multifaceted is not messy if there is a worldview underneath it. A person can talk about many things and still feel coherent when the same pattern keeps appearing. (e.g. Emma Chamberlain, from studying-with-me YouTube videos to Chamberlain Coffee, red carpets, Shopify ambassador, and maybe acting, and somehow it still make her usual spiralling sense..

The same taste.

The same tension.

The same questions.

The same way of noticing.

The same refusal.

The same obsession.

For me, the pattern is becoming clearer.

I am interested in how people, brands, and businesses become more legible, desirable, and trusted without becoming less human. I am interested in the emotional architecture behind commercial decisions. I am interested in taste as a strategy. I am interested in marketing that does not treat people like funnels with shoes. I am interested in how AI is forcing us to reconsider originality, expertise, labour, and the value of having a point of view. I am interested in why some brands feel alive and others feel like someone filled out a template correctly and called it a personality.

That is not one topic.

But it is one way of seeing.

Dimension Is the Strategy

Maybe the goal is not to niche down until I become one clean internet category.

Maybe the goal is to become coherent enough that my range becomes recognisable.

I do not want to file down every strange edge until I become easy to explain at a networking event. I want to build a body of work with dimension.

A body of work that can hold marketing and memory.

Strategy and taste.

Commercial thinking and personal story.

AI and humanity.

Ambition and uncertainty.

The practical and the poetic.

Because that is how I think. That is how I work. That is how I move through the world.

And maybe that is the real work. Not choosing between all the parts of myself. But being able to build an architecture that can hold them.

To Be Dimensional Is to Refuse the Cheapest Version of Clarity

I still believe in clarity though. Deeply. But I am becoming suspicious of the cheapest version of it that is constantly telling us to say less, be simpler, or choosing one thing to make yourself easier to sell. 

Maybe that is what the restlessness was trying to tell me all along. Maybe the need to create something, without knowing exactly what, was not a lack of focus. Maybe it was the beginning of an architecture. Maybe it was my mind refusing to become flat. Maybe the work was never to become one thing, but to become unmistakably many things, held together by one way of seeing.

So before you rush to define your niche, maybe ask a better question. What are the themes that keep finding their way back to you? What do you notice that other people miss? What tension are you always trying to resolve? What kind of work could only come from your particular mix of experience, taste, instinct, and obsession?

That might be where the real strategy begins. Not in shrinking yourself into something easier to explain, but in building a body of work with enough structure to hold your full dimension.