Personal branding is the deliberate practice of shaping how an individual is perceived in public — through visible work, content, voice, appearance, and association — typically in service of career, influence, business, or earning potential.
The phrase entered general usage through Tom Peters's 1997 Fast Company essay "The Brand Called You," which argued that knowledge workers should think of themselves as brands rather than employees in an era of looser job tenure. The internet, social media, and the creator economy have since pushed personal branding from an option for executives and consultants to a default operating layer for founders, freelancers, salespeople, and a growing share of the workforce.
The discipline overlaps closely with reputation management and thought leadership, but is distinct in scope: reputation is about controlling what is said; thought leadership is about being heard on a specific subject; personal branding is the overall positioning of the person as a recognizable, ownable identity. Done well it compounds; done poorly it reads as performance, and audiences notice the gap.