A philosophy of personal branding
Identity Positioning™
Most personal branding advice treats a reputation as a marketing problem. Identity Positioning™ treats it as a position: something you hold, something that can be measured, and something that can be lost.
The five pillars
Every position rests on five pillars. The Brand Audit scores all five and reports where a position is carried, and where it is exposed.
Omnipresence
Visible and discoverable, whenever and wherever possible. Repeated exposure is what produces familiarity, and familiarity is what produces trust.
Credibility
Trust is the understanding that your claims are accurate and your word holds. It is built through the consistent exchange of influence in the form of edification, not through follower counts.
Seamless Branding
The consistent and maintained portrayal of one person. There should be no doubt who you are when someone introduces you, on or offline.
Reputational Health & Risks
A position is always one misstep from falling. Reputational health is the foundation under everything else, which is why it caps the composite rather than only contributing to it.
Marketability
Whether attention converts. A personal brand has deliverable products and services, a clear offer, and somewhere for interest to go.
The Hierarchy of Personal Branding
Six tiers, from a person who does not know they have a personal brand to one recognised across the world. The Hierarchy measures the scale of a position. The pillars measure its quality. A Local Hero can hold a near-perfect position, and an International Icon can hold a failing one.
| 1 | Unconscious Incompetent Unaware they have a personal brand at all; not yet directing it. |
| 2 | Friends and Family Known only within an existing personal circle. Rarely exceeds 100 people. |
| 3 | The Local Hero Recognized within a community through deliberate, conscious effort. 500 or more people. |
| 4 | The State Representative Well-established authority known within a region. 100,000 or more people. |
| 5 | The National Personality Recognizable nationally; represented by agents, teams, and professional support. 1,000,000 or more people. |
| 6 | The International Icon Global fame and influence, largely one-directional. |
Three ways in
The Brand Audit
A free personal brand audit. Twenty-five questions, seven minutes. A composite score, five pillar scores, a risk register, and the three moves that raise the score most.
Start the auditIdentity Positioner™
An AI personal brand consultant trained on the methodology and Isaac Mashman's body of work. Strategic counsel on demand, between sessions or on your own.
See what is comingThe Paper
Identity Positioning: A Macroscopic View on Personal Branding. Published academically and reproduced here in full, unaltered.
Read itWhere this comes from
Identity Positioning™ is the methodology of Mashman Consulting Group, developed by Isaac Mashman and Eric Chow. It is documented in the white paper, published academically in 2024, and in Personal Branding: A Manifesto on Fame and Influence, Second Edition.
Every question in the Brand Audit traces to a chapter of that book. The scoring is fixed and published-derived rather than improvised, which is what makes a score defensible when someone challenges it.