Building a Personal Brand That Works: How I Position Myself as a Marketer

My name is Aaron Sharp, and I'm a natural visionary. For as long as I can remember, my imagination has guided me through life, helping me take ideas and develop them into actual living, breathing things. In 2018, I recognized what I believed was a glaring scarcity of Black-owned luxury brands in the marketplace. There were plenty of Black artists, athletes, and celebrities endorsing or collaborating with luxury brands such as Balenciaga, Christian Louboutin, and others, but very few owned the brands themselves. Those same luxury brands clearly understood the value of aligning themselves with Black culture in order to convert more Black consumers. I wondered why more of that value wasn't being captured through ownership. So, in 2019, I made a conscious effort to build the kind of Black-owned luxury brand I wanted to see in the marketplace. Enter Mandeaux.

Ironically, I haven't had to seriously market myself as an individual since I worked as a professional actor and model more than 20 years ago. Back then, I was essentially selling my ability to perform as talent for businesses that already had a vision and a message they wanted to convey. It was fairly simple. Either I fit that vision or I did not. It was also a cutthroat industry. If they wanted you, you heard back. If they did not, you usually heard nothing. Modeling was especially unforgiving because rejection was usually based on how you looked. As an actor, if your performance was subpar, you could take classes, study improv, or learn techniques like the Lee Strasberg Method. Modeling rejection hit different because the product being rejected was you.

Since then, I've primarily operated as a business rather than a personal brand. Many more people recognize my brand, Mandeaux, way before they know Aaron Sharp. So intentionally developing my personal brand is relatively new territory for me. I also recognize why it matters. People tend to do business with people they know, like, and trust. A personal brand gives someone an opportunity to understand who you are, what you believe, and what value you provide before you ever make an offer. For marketers, I believe this is particularly important. We ask companies to trust us with their reputation, audience, attention, and money. If we can't effectively communicate our own value, how can we communicate someone else's? I see this often in the marketing space with all these new “agencies.” They have no portfolio or proof that they've done anything, yet they're asking for thousands of dollars upfront.

Why Marketers Have to Market Themselves

To me, a personal brand is the reputation and the expectations that become synonymous with your name. It's what people think of you before you even enter the room and, hopefully, what they continue to believe even after you leave it. Marketing yourself is personal, unlike how we market products. We can reposition a product. Repackage it, discount it, or even discontinue it without hurting its feelings. People are more complicated. Therefore, personal branding requires a balance between strategically positioning yourself and staying true to yourself. Labrecque, Markos, and Milne (2011) explain that online personal branding involves strategically presenting oneself to establish a desired identity and differentiate oneself from others. Gorbatov, Khapova, and Lysova (2018) similarly describe personal branding as a strategic process connected to how individuals communicate their value to a target audience. Without that intentionality, other people can ultimately define your brand for you.

If I was looking at a typical corporate marketing job right now, my goal would be a Regional Director of Marketing position. Although I have years of entrepreneurial and marketing experience, I've never worked as an in-house marketer for a large corporation. I would prefer to begin with a position that allows me to learn about the inner workings of an organization's operations, how it functions internally, and what organizational dynamics exist. From there, I can grow into more responsible leadership roles. What I have to offer isn't something that can just be taught. My knowledge and experience came from years of action. I understand what it means to own and run businesses. I've had to develop businesses from ideas into profitable companies, many times by myself and without the aid of established systems, procedures, or direction from another person.

My experience separates me from what might be considered a traditional MBA candidate. Many of the concepts I've encountered throughout my MBA program are concepts I've already had to apply in the real world, sometimes without knowing the academic terminology behind them. I've learned to recognize changes in the marketplace and adjust on the fly rather than waiting until something has already happened and reacting to it. There's also a different sense of responsibility when you bootstrap a company. When it's your money, your reputation, your inventory, and your livelihood at risk, marketing decisions become much more than classroom exercises. Roberts and Zahay (2018) discuss marketing within an increasingly interconnected digital ecosystem where businesses, customers, channels, and other participants work together to create value. My entrepreneurial experience has required me to operate within that ecosystem from multiple perspectives. I've been the business owner, marketer, advertiser, web developer, and person ultimately responsible for whether the customer decided to buy.

My Positioning

My positioning is relatively straightforward. For organizations looking for a marketing leader who understands both strategy and execution, I'm a marketer who knows how to transform ideas into brands people are willing to trust and buy from because I've repeatedly done it with my own businesses. Going from brand owner to agency founder has only strengthened that perspective. As a founder, I learned what it feels like to be the client. I understand what it means to spend money on marketing and expect that investment to produce something meaningful. As an agency owner, I now must take those experiences and apply them to businesses with different customers, industries, challenges, and goals.

Perhaps the strongest evidence of my ability to create perceived value is Mandeaux. While press coverage and celebrities donning Mandeaux have been exciting, one accomplishment stands above the rest for me. Mandeaux has sold footwear to customers in more than a dozen countries, including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Poland, and Australia. These customers were being asked to spend approximately $300 to $600 of their hard-earned money on footwear from an independent luxury brand. In many cases, they had never seen our products in person, touched the materials, or tried on a pair of shoes. Everything they believed about the quality, craftsmanship, exclusivity, and value of Mandeaux had to be communicated through the brand itself. Convincing customers thousands of miles away to make that purchase is something I consider a remarkable accomplishment and a testament to how successfully the brand was positioned.

Mandeaux also spent approximately a year and a half in Bonobos at its Cobble Hill location in Brooklyn, and our footwear has been worn by recognizable entertainers and athletes including Nas, Bill Bellamy, Anthony Anderson, Marcus Scribner, Jack Flaherty, and Dorell Wright, among others. Those moments taught me that attention can be extremely valuable, but attention alone is not a brand. The harder challenge is creating enough credibility and perceived value that attention turns into trust and, ultimately, a purchase. This has become even more important as digital and social channels have changed the relationship between brands and consumers. Digital marketing is no longer simply about broadcasting a message. It creates opportunities for interaction, relationship building, and value creation across numerous touchpoints (Dwivedi et al., 2021).

Entrepreneurship has also taught me to pay attention to problems that other people accept as normal. AK Biz Hub is a good example. Looking around Alaska, I saw valuable business resources, organizations, and events scattered across countless websites and Facebook pages. Finding out what was happening could mean searching 20 different places, which was exhausting and inefficient. Rather than continuing to complain about the fragmentation, I built AK Biz Hub as a centralized resource. The platform automatically pulls events from multiple sources into one location while also serving as a business directory where consumers can discover new providers of products and services.

Optimeaux came from an even more direct problem I encountered while doing web design and development. Clients routinely send photos and videos for their websites in their original file sizes. A single photograph can easily be 20MB, which is unnecessarily large for the web and can significantly hurt page load performance and the user experience. Existing tools could compress those images, but I believed the process could be better. Optimeaux allows users to optimize images directly in their browser, including converting them to modern formats such as WebP, often reducing file sizes by more than 90 percent. The files never need to be uploaded to a server, original filenames can be retained, and images can be processed in bulk. A task that once required several steps can be completed in less than 30 seconds. Again, the idea came from experiencing a problem firsthand and asking a simple question. Why does this have to be this difficult?

What Sets Me Apart

As I intentionally develop the Aaron Sharp personal brand, there are three words I want associated with my name. I want to be known as visionary, resourceful, and proven. Those characteristics are related to Mandeaux, but the brands shouldn't be identical. Mandeaux represents luxury, sophistication, craftsmanship, and exclusivity. Aaron Sharp should represent vision, entrepreneurship, problem-solving, and business growth. My personal website can serve as the home for that story, my ventures, case studies, accomplishments, and longer-form thinking. LinkedIn can establish professional authority and connect me with other business and marketing leaders. Instagram can provide a more personal look behind the businesses and ideas I'm developing. The content doesn't need to be identical across every platform, but the person represented on each should be consistent. Khedher (2014) emphasizes that personal branding requires individuals to establish and communicate a distinct identity, while Peters (1997) argued decades ago that professionals should begin thinking of themselves as brands responsible for communicating their own value. That concept has only become more relevant in a digital environment where people can encounter my personal brand across multiple platforms before ever meeting me.

Being experienced doesn't mean I've mastered every aspect of marketing. One area where I'd like to develop greater personal expertise is advanced paid advertising. I have team members who are highly skilled with Google and Meta advertising, and I've been able to rely on their expertise. As a result, I haven't personally dedicated the same amount of time to mastering the more advanced techniques within those platforms. Developing a stronger understanding would make me a better marketing leader, even when I'm not the person directly managing the campaigns.

That's also part of why pursuing Strategic Marketing at this stage of my career is valuable. My education in marketing didn't begin in a classroom. Much of it came from necessity. When you build businesses with your own money, a poor marketing decision isn't simply a case study to discuss. It has consequences. My MBA experience has allowed me to attach formal frameworks, research, terminology, and analytical thinking to lessons I sometimes learned through trial, error, and experience. It's helping me become more deliberate about why certain strategies work rather than relying exclusively on the instincts I developed as an entrepreneur.

Where I'm Headed

Five years from now, however, I want the Aaron Sharp brand to represent something broader than marketing. I want people to immediately associate my name with helping new business owners succeed. I want the businesses I've built and the businesses I've helped to become the evidence. If someone considering working with me hasn't done so yet, I want them wondering why they waited. More importantly, I want entrepreneurs to recognize the value of having someone in their corner who has actually traveled the road they're attempting to travel. I have built brands, made mistakes, solved problems, sold products around the world, developed technology, marketed businesses, and learned lessons that cannot always be found in a textbook. My goal is to turn that experience into wisdom that can shorten someone else's learning curve.

If I were back in that marketing interview today and someone asked me, “Tell me about yourself,” my answer would be much clearer than it might have been several years ago. My name is Aaron Sharp. I'm an entrepreneur, marketer, and natural visionary who turns ideas into businesses, problems into solutions, and experience into strategies that help brands grow. Mandeaux, Mandeaux Digital, AK Biz Hub, Optimeaux, and the businesses I've had the opportunity to help are chapters of that story, but they're not the end of it. I'm still building, and I intend for the Aaron Sharp name to eventually become just as meaningful as the brands I have spent years building.