The Missing Piece In Raising Human-Centered Brands

We thought personal brands and entrepreneurship were the solution to burnout culture. We were wrong. And to understand why, we need to ask the question:

What do toxic corporate brands and unsustainable personal brands have in common?

The Answer:

Weak Ego.

Wait what!?

Most people think Ego is the problem. The real issue, however, is weak Ego. Let's clarify…

Ego is not confidence. Ego is not inflated self-worth. Narcissism is actually a manifestation of weak Ego.

What then is Ego? And what does this have to do with branding?

Let's start at the beginning with a crash course in psychology.

Ego, Id, Superego, and Personas

Ego is the function of your personality that helps you stay grounded, make wise choices, and manage emotions.

It acts as a peacekeeper and synthesizer, balancing your instincts and desires (the Id) with your morals and conscience (the Superego).

In childhood, the Id is in full force. You've seen this—the unfiltered child who shows up raw in every moment.

As we grow, our cultural context—family, religion, school, society, workplace—contributes to the formation of our Superego.

In a healthy person with well-developed Ego strength, the Self can oscillate between the Id and Superego, choosing moment to moment between instincts and compliance, or desires and obligations, to best serve the Self.

Adults who lack Ego strength will struggle to thrive, consistently becoming the victims of their Id's impulsive behavior or overcorrecting by building an ironclad, oppressive Superego.

But here's the catch:

All of this is happening below the surface, masked by the resulting Personas.

No, I'm not talking about customer personas (though they do have their origin here).

I'm referring to the roles we assume and the parts we play.

The version of yourself that you know? That's Ego.

The version/s others know? Those are Personas.

Personas are a necessary function; everyone builds them. But not all Personas are created equal.

Some are adaptive—anchored in Ego strength, able to shuffle in and out of use without losing coherence.

Some are protective—built to obey or survive.

Some are performative, built to impress.

Stable ↔ Volatile

Expressive ↔ Oppressive

Embodied ↔ Performative

Where a Persona lands along these spectrums depends on its key influences, Ego, Id, or Superego.

When Ego is in charge, life is good. When a Persona is mainly driven by the Id, it will either be observably dysfunctional and deemed increasingly invaluable, or the person who adopts it will struggle to participate in society. To the contrary, people with Personas driven by Superego can get very far before things start to go sideways.

What does this have to do with raising brands?

Great question!

A personal brand is a Persona.

A company brand is a Persona too—a collective one, expected to be adopted to some degree or another by people at every level of the organization.

When Ego strength is on board, both personal brands and company brands can be forces for good. When Ego is weak, chances are the Superego is the organizing force and this can be very dangerous indeed.

Let's examine this claim in a cultural context.

The Cult of Professionalism

➜ The Cult of Professionalism believes that success comes from control, composure, and compliance.

For a long time, the majority of high-functioning professionals rose through the ranks by adopting Personas deemed appropriate by their employers.

These Personas were fueled by varying combinations of Ego and Superego, depending on who embodied them.

If the Ego of an individual was strong and allowed the person to code-switch—"at work” vs. “not at work"—all good.

But when the Ego is weak (which, truthfully, many people's are), the Superego is in charge too much of the time.

Your outward Self performs obedience.

The inner Self withers under the weight of perfection, professionalism, and “what will they think?"

➜ With the Cult of Professionalism, we're left feeling not good enough because we can't measure up.

This dynamic really came to a head in the 80s and 90s.

Millennial kids who saw the ruthless impact of parents stuck in Superego-dominant Persona decided:

“No. We won't do that again."

And we began to build something new, The Cult of Authenticity.

The Cult of Authenticity

➜ The Cult of Authenticity believes that success comes from full self-expression.

Over the past 20 years, this belief has reshaped the professional world, especially for founders.

Personal brands have become more than tools; they have become identities. Power shifted from polish to passion, from composure to confession.

This Persona isn't defined by conformity, but by visibility. You are expected to be transparent, emotional, open, and always "real." The more raw you are, the more trust you deserve.

If the Ego is strong, it can set boundaries, knowing when to reveal and when to restrain.

But when Ego is weak (and many are), the Superego begins to exploit the Self, stripping it of relational boundaries, personal privacy, thoughtful pause, emotional safety, and more, all in the name of complete undiluted brave authenticity.

Eventually, paradoxically, the Self still withers this time under the judgment of not being authentic enough. Or worse, being the wrong kind of authentic.

➜ With the Cult of Authenticity, if we can't measure up, we're left feeling that at our core, we're not enough.

Here's the problem:

The pendulum rarely lands in the middle before crossing into a nearby level of the matrix. No. It swings hard and fast in the other direction.

Instead of looking at the root cause of the burnout epidemic—Ego strength or lack thereof—we just changed our costumes and started performing a new play with the same story arc.

So, it's no surprise that we are hustling harder now than ever before, still burning out, and turning to technology to fill the void and claw our way to the top.

And in this world, Founders are sold two bits of expensive advice:

1. Focus on building an “authentic" personal brand

2. Then scale your business on the back of your authentic personal brand

I feel very deeply that this advice is not only wrong.

It's dangerous.

But in a subculture where we not only have to work, but want to work, how do we fix this? How do we raise brands that nourish instead of drain, heal instead of harm?

Raising An Anti-Cult Brand

You thought I was using this word lightly, but I wasn't. I was using it literally, because a cult is at its core a system of imposed ideals—rigid, absolute, moralizing. It offers belonging, but only through conformity to a Persona. You are accepted if you reflect the values of the group—professionalism vs. authenticity, no less and no more. It is structure, an identity, imposed from outside.

An anti-cult, on the other hand, is not rebellion for its own sake. It is integration. Here, the Ego leads—not by force, but by function. The Ego mediates tension. It knows when to express and when to contain. It holds opposites without collapsing: impulse and strategy, transparency and discretion. In the anti-cult, you are not fused with the Persona. It is structure, an identity, grown from within and engaged intentionally.

So I will prescribe a remedy that goes against most advice in your feed:

➜ Don't build an "authentic" personal brand. And don't try to scale your company on it.

Instead, raise a strategic human-centered personal brand if personal gain is your aim.

And raise a strategic human-centered company brand if scaling is your aim.

Since my clients are founders—not executive track professionals—at Humaniz we specialize in the latter. And to be fair, Founders do need to consider doing some deep work in both the personal brand and company brand camps.

And that's why I plan to unpack both issues in sequence in the following two issues of On Raising Brands.

But in the meantime, if you are a Founder who has read this far, you probably don't want to wait a whole month to take action, so I'll point you to our complimentary Brand IdQ™ tool, which is designed to shed light on your brand's inherent Id, Superego, and Ego and kickstart the process of creating that strategic human centered brand persona.

Ready to raise your brand up right?

Engage with Brand IdQ + Results Integration Call to start humanizing your brand.

And make sure to subscribe below so we can send the next two issues in the series directly to you inbox!

---

---

Who We Are

"We don’t create brands, because we truly believe that every business already has a brand. Rather, our role is to help founders and their teams embody the brand fully, express it with more clarity, and expand its influence and impact with more confidence."

~ Charlie Birch, Author of On Raising Brands + Founder and Creative Director @ Humaniz Collective

Bringing a brand to market is just the beginning of your brand’s development and life story. 

And that’s where we come in!

We’re creative, marketing and operational experts working together to ensure brands come to life from the inside out.

We support brands throughout their lifecycle across three phases of service:

• Brand Strategy

• Brand Design

• Brand Stewardship

If you’re looking for a brand partner to walk beside you, ensuring your brand grows up healthy and strong, makes good life choices, and attracts the right people into its orbit, Humaniz Collective is the obvious choice.

Engage with Brand IdQ - our complimentary brand strategy generator - and let us prove our worth.

→ Engage Brand IdQ

Beyond the Friendship Factor: Scaling Brand Loyalty

You started your business to serve your community. You know the people. You know the culture. You know the gaps. You’ve built something meaningful to meet them there.

And it worked. Customers came. Sales happened. The thing grew.

But now you’re hitting a wall.

You have a core crew of loyalists who share on social, wear your merch, they are willing to pay premium prices, and they sing your praises. A bulk of your business comes from them, but you can’t rely on them exclusively if you’re going to grow to the next level.

So you are wondering, trying to crack the code, how do I turn these “other customers” into loyalists?

As far as you can tell the main difference is — the crew — they know you personally. And while it’s a nice feeling to know your people have your back, it’s a double-edged sword because you can’t scale friendship.

You’ve read about branding, how it can create loyalty and prime people to pay a premium, but so far investments in these superficial things have not shown a great return.

What gives?

Consider this:

Brand’s primary goal is not to look professional or expensive, it’s to set expectations.

What do I mean?

It’s like parenting a teenager in high school.

Maybe your kid’s a theater kid. Maybe they’re a jock.

But what they are not is universally liked. No one is.

And trying to be liked by everyone just makes them harder to trust.

You know I’m right. We all know that clique switcher. Who is punk rock one day and pops a polo collar the next, just trying desperately to be liked and accepted. It’s sad and equally hard to be around.

If you want them to thrive, you don’t tell them to win over the whole school.

You help them know who they are, own it, and show up in a way that makes it easy for their people to find them.

Your brand works the same way.

It doesn’t need to appeal to everyone in your community.

It needs to attract people who truly value what you’ve built and will be loyal through the highs and lows.

Not just the ones riding the wave of your popularity, but also those who are here for the experience.

That’s what strong brands do:

They set expectations.

They filter the room.

And they help the right people recognize they’ve found their place.

Here’s the reframe:

Right now, your brand is conflated with your personality.

The people who know you personally get the full experience. Everyone else? They’re just getting the product. And in this space, that’s not enough.

Brand isn’t just about being hip or polished—it’s about setting expectations.

It tells the customer what kind of experience to expect and what type of person that experience is truly designed for.

And not everyone is your person.

You personally can’t be besties with every customer, but your brand can if it’s clear enough to attract the right customer in the first place.

The customers who are your friends get the personal feeling of belonging to the crew from you, and the rest of the business is a bonus. However, the rest of the customers only get half the value. Arguably, the less valuable half.

Your team needs a clear system they can engage to ensure all customer interactions cultivate that same feeling. This is what people are actually buying—the product or service is just the vehicle. They come for the coffee; they stay for the experience of belonging.

But here’s the kicker…

You don’t want to treat everyone differently.

You don’t want to take the lead from the customer.

It’s safe to assume your friends are drawn to you because of you, not your ability to change who you are for each of them.

You have a type. And that’s precisely the point.

Trying to make everyone feel they belong dilutes the brand.

On the other hand, getting crystal clear on who you want to attract—and cultivating a space that makes that person feel part of the in-crowd—will repel mismatched customers and attract the right fits.

Let’s talk cost.

If you constantly try to “fix” customer issues, defend your pricing, or overdeliver to compensate for mismatched expectations, that’s not just frustrating. It’s expensive.

You’re spending time and emotional bandwidth on support and repair that could be going toward growth and refinement.

You’re losing word-of-mouth momentum because your best customers don’t have a clear enough story to tell about you.

You’re missing out on the kind of aligned customers who don’t just buy once—they belong.

Imagine this instead:

Your brand doesn’t just look good. It feels right to the people you most want to serve.

Your messaging, your experience, your follow-through—they all line up.

People know what to expect before they buy. And after they buy? They say, “Yes. This is exactly what I hoped it would be.”

Those customers spend more, stay longer, and bring others with them.

And your business becomes easier to run, because you’re finally building a customer base that doesn’t need convincing. They’re already aligned.

Why Us

At Humaniz, we help customer-obsessed B2C brands do more than merely look the part.

We help you define and externalize a brand identity that attracts the right people and sets expectations that your business is built to meet.

So your best customers don’t just find you. They stay.

Ready to raise your brand up right?

If this is the kind of brand you want to live inside of, here are some significant next steps:

• Subscribe to On Raising Brands for more founder-centric reframes and insights about raising your brand up right.

• Engage with Brand IdQ + Results Integration Call to start humanizing your brand.

---

---

Who We Are

"We don’t create brands, because we truly believe that every business already has a brand. Rather, our role is to help founders and their teams embody the brand fully, express it with more clarity, and expand its influence and impact with more confidence."

~ Charlie Birch, Author of On Raising Brands + Founder and Creative Director @ Humaniz Collective

Bringing a brand to market is just the beginning of your brand’s development and life story. 

And that’s where we come in!

We’re creative, marketing and operational experts working together to ensure brands come to life from the inside out.

We support brands throughout their lifecycle across three phases of service:

• Brand Strategy

• Brand Design

• Brand Stewardship

If you’re looking for a brand partner to walk beside you, ensuring your brand grows up healthy and strong, makes good life choices, and attracts the right people into its orbit, Humaniz Collective is the obvious choice.

Engage with Brand IdQ - our complimentary brand strategy generator - and let us prove our worth.

→ Engage Brand IdQ

When More Leads Isn’t the Answer - The Founder Brand Gap

You've done everything right.

You built the thing. You got traction. You sold on instinct, tweaked messaging, played with funnels. And it worked for a while.

But now, it's not enough.

The growth you need—the kind that supports a team, creates breathing room, and gets you out of the daily grind—requires more revenue.

So you press harder. Post more. Test another strategy. Plug in some AI to keep up with the volume. But the returns don't match the effort. You're landing sales, sure, but not enough. It feels like you're doing everything, and somehow, you're more stuck than ever.

What if the real problem isn't lead volume—

but a disconnect between you, the founder, and your brand?

What do I mean?

You've built the business on instinct. You feel the brand. You express it. You are the brand. Right?

Wrong.

That enmeshment between you and your idea of the brand—that closeness—creates confusion.

It's like parenting.

If you see your child as an extension of yourself, you risk stunting their growth—making decisions based on your needs, not theirs. Similarly, you risk a reality where your child has a whole life - that for better or worse - you know nothing about.

On the other hand, when you see a child as a distinct being, everything changes.

You understand that they will eventually take on a life of their own. Instead of trying to control them, you intentionally work to instill the values, beliefs, skills, habits, and strategies that will help them—not you—reach their full potential. And you hope this helps them attract the right people and opportunities into their orbit.

Raising a brand up right is much the same.

You must get to know your brand—what it wants and needs to be—and make every decision through that lens.

That differentiation between you and the brand is exactly what gives you the power to influence its growth—without having to control every move. It's also what gives you perspective, reduces reactionary decisions, allows you to ask the brand what to do next, and eventually delegate more and more important roles and responsibilities to other team members effectively. But that's a conversation for another day.

Right now, if you need more revenue to scale or are scaling to generate more revenue, chances are you need better clients vs. more clients. Clients who aren't haggling over price, clients with a longer lifespan, clients who are loyal to the brand because they - like you understand the actual value. When these clients are few and far between, it's easy to conclude that you have a targeting problem.

But if your brand has never been fully differentiated, can you say with confidence that the brand you envision and the brand you built are the same?

Often, we find that Founders think they're selling one thing, but their marketing, customer experience, pricing, and delivery systems, which are influenced more by the founder's social and professional circles than the brand identity itself, are bringing something entirely different to life.

The market isn't responding to the brand you intended to build.

It's responding to the one that's truly been built.

Hence the question…

"What if the real problem isn't lead volume—but a disconnect between you, the founder, and your brand?"

Until you bridge that divide, the brand that lives in your mind will struggle to attract those perfect fit customers.

That's the bad news.

The good news? It's fixable.

But first —because I can already hear you saying "more work, more money, no thanks"—

Let's talk about the cost of not course correcting.

Maybe you're spending 20+ hours of your own time managing, rewriting, and trying to "fix" work done by the digital ad ($1,200/month), cold email ($1,000/month), and organic social media ($2,000/month) services teams you've invested in. Your hourly rate is $150.

That's $7,000/month, and you aren't even sure it's moving you in the right direction.

Now imagine this:

You start to consistently attract more qualified leads who pay more and stick around longer, meaning they ultimately spend more. The value of each client increases tremendously. As a result, you need fewer leads, and the acquisition cost comes down. This means you spend less time and money on lead gen.

Is that worth a pattern interrupt? We think it is.

Is it easy? No. Is it cheap? No. But you wouldn't trust I was telling the truth if I said yes. Let's be clear: I am not suggesting you do more work; I am suggesting you do different work.

The work of:

• teasing brand identity apart from founder identity. Once this is done right, all your decisions can be filtered through this brand identity lens vs. made from a place of urgency.

• externalizing that identity so the brand no longer lives in your head. Now, other team members can see the brand for precisely what it is vs. working off assumptions and interpretations.

• operationalizing the brand so that each team member can embody it fully, express it clearly, and expand its reach, impact, and influence with confidence.

With this work under your belt, you're no longer chasing tactics.  You're building a business with integrity.

You're not shouting louder or longer—you're projecting clear, targeted value in a memorable way.

And the right people?

They get it. And they come ready.

—

If this is the kind of brand you want to live inside of, here are some significant next steps:

• Subscribe to On Raising Brands for more founder-centric reframes and insights about raising your brand up right.

• Engage with Brand IdQ to start humanizing your brand at no cost.

• Reach out to book a Brand Marketplace Presence Assessment designed to reveal manifestations of this exact "founder -> brand disconnect" in your client acquisition pipeline.

---

---

Who We Are

"We don’t create brands, because we truly believe that every business already has a brand. Rather, our role is to help founders and their teams embody the brand fully, express it with more clarity, and expand its influence and impact with more confidence."

~ Charlie Birch, Author of On Raising Brands + Founder and Creative Director @ Humaniz Collective

Bringing a brand to market is just the beginning of your brand’s development and life story. 

And that’s where we come in!

We’re creative, marketing and operational experts working together to ensure brands come to life from the inside out.

We support brands throughout their lifecycle across three phases of service:

• Brand Strategy

• Brand Design

• Brand Stewardship

If you’re looking for a brand partner to walk beside you, ensuring your brand grows up healthy and strong, makes good life choices, and attracts the right people into its orbit, Humaniz Collective is the obvious choice.

Engage with Brand IdQ - our complimentary brand strategy generator - and let us prove our worth.

→ Engage Brand IdQ

Rethinking Brand - The Essential Mindset Shift

At Humaniz, we believe brand strategy done right is a high-level decision-making lens that founders and their teams can deploy to scale the brand with integrity.

Brands aren't created but born and thus must be raised with intention.

To understand this, you must first understand that brand is not just about looking good, saying the right thing in your subject line, or creating magnetic digital ads.

Brand is what happens in the space between the people who bring the business to life.

• The space between the founder and the business.

• The space between the founder and the team.

• The space between the business and the customer.

• The space between the customer and the team.

• The space between respective customers.

• The space between all those people and the marketplace.

Brand is individual and group behavior shaped by:

• Driving Purpose

• Primal Needs

• Core Beliefs

• Habits

• Relational Strategies

Because these are the building blocks of identity. Indentity is a precursor to consistency. Consistency is a requirement for integrity. And integrity is precisely what's required to establish trust and loyalty in the marketplace.

However, too often, the brand a founder thinks they have and the brand they actually have diverges because they misunderstand "brand" as the decoration on their packaging or marketing campaigns, a logo on a piece of schwag when, in fact, it's the pervasive human experience of being in their brand's orbit, which is the compound effect of every touchpoint.

On Raising Brands is our soapbox to highlight all the big deal, real human consequences founders will tackle and risk encountering if they continue to treat the brand like a new hairdo vs. the lifeblood and connective tissue of their business.

---

---

Who We Are

"We don’t create brands, because we truly believe that every business already has a brand. Rather, our role is to help founders and their teams embody the brand fully, express it with more clarity, and expand its influence and impact with more confidence."

~ Charlie Birch, Author of On Raising Brands + Founder and Creative Director @ Humaniz Collective

Bringing a brand to market is just the beginning of your brand’s development and life story. 

And that’s where we come in!

We’re creative, marketing and operational experts working together to ensure brands come to life from the inside out.

We support brands throughout their lifecycle across three phases of service:

• Brand Strategy

• Brand Design

• Brand Stewardship

If you’re looking for a brand partner to walk beside you, ensuring your brand grows up healthy and strong, makes good life choices, and attracts the right people into its orbit, Humaniz Collective is the obvious choice.

Engage with Brand IdQ - our complimentary brand strategy generator - and let us prove our worth.

→ Engage Brand IdQ