The Five-Point Guide: How Guy Kawasaki Built his Personal Brand

The strength of your personal brand plays a huge role in how people connect to you. Happily, you can look to the experts to see how it’s done.

Your personal brand is your lifeblood as a speaker.

Remember that credibility and authenticity are both huge parts of being a storyshower. You’re not just showing your story when you get up on stage. You’re selling yourself.

You’re asking an audience to engage with you on an emotional level and care about the story you show. Most importantly, you want them to continue engaging once the speech ends.

That means you need a personal brand to show them after the event.

The difficulty comes in figuring out how to build your brand. What do you have to do to get people to pay attention and connect with you?

You don’t have to try and figure it out on your own. There are plenty of people who’ve built amazing personal brands who can inspire you.

Guy Kawasaki is one such person.

Who Is Guy Kawasaki?

Guy Kawasaki is what’s known as an evangelist. In the business world, this means somebody who goes to bat for an organisation. He puts himself out there to talk about what makes the businesses he cares about so great.

You can think of him as a business preacher.

During his career, Kawasaki has acted as an evangelist for the likes of Apple and Mercedes-Benz. At the time of writing, he evangelises for Canva.

That on its own would make for an impressive career. But Kawasaki’s also a noted author who’s written 13 books. Plus, he’s an impressive speaker who delivers 50 keynote speeches every year.

In short, he’s one of the guys to go to when you’re building a brand. To reach that position, he’s had to develop his personal brand.

How did he do it?

There’s a five-point strategy to Kawasaki’s success that you can put into practice today.

Point #1 – Find Your Meaning

You’re running a speaking business, which means you want to make money. That’s what every entrepreneur wants, regardless of their industry.

The key is that it can’t become the only thing you want. And that goes doubly if you’re trying to build a personal brand.

Guy Kawasaki says that it’s crucial that you have a meaning behind your brand. This applies to both businesses and to yourself.

In the context of business, he says: “Meaning is not creating a cool place to work with free food, Ping-Pong, volleyball, and dogs. Meaning is making the world a better place.”

In your personal brand, it means that you can’t act like you’re just interested in people’s money. You’re trying to build a connection with an audience. If there’s no deeper meaning behind what you’re doing, people aren’t going to care about you. They might like a product that you’re selling but your story won’t resonate.

Kawasaki offers up two questions to ask for finding your meaning:

1. Is there a wrong that only you can make right?
2. Is there something you can do to prevent something awesome from ending?

You can boil these two questions down to the big question:

What can you do to make the world better?

It’s this reason that gets people to engage with your brand. And it doesn’t have to be something huge. Making the world a better place can be as simple as inspiring a couple of people to choose a new path.

There just has to be more to you than money. And as Kawasaki says: “If you make meaning, you’ll probably also make money.”

Point #2 – Be Who You Are

So many people try to fit in to what they think people want.

As a speaker, you may think that your audience expects you to turn up suited and booted. You may think that they want you to present them with a certain look and message.

The problem here is that trying to do this dilutes your authenticity. People can tell when there’s a faker standing in front of them. If you’re not being who you are, you’re not going to get people to engage.

You have to show people the personal in your personal branding.

In Kawasaki’s case, this means showing an infectious enthusiasm for everything that he does. He’s a loud and extremely positive person and you can see that in his speeches and how he evangelises.

Not everyone’s going to connect to his personality. But the same holds true for everybody. You can’t please every single person, no matter how much you try to force yourself into a mould.

Be true to who you are in everything that you do. It’s about finding the audience that wants to hear your story, rather than trying to create a story that appeals to everybody.

Point #3 – Showcase the People Who Like You

Long before Kawasaki had the army of social media followers he has now, he had one person.

Steve Jobs.

The Apple co-founder loved Kawasaki’s energy and passion. Long before he had a personal brand of his own, Kawasaki found a supporter in Jobs.

That’s what led to his role as Apple’s chief evangelist. From there, a personal branding phenomenon was born.

You can apply this situation to your early days as a speaker. You may not have a massive audience yet. But there are people who connect with you and the story you’re showing.

Showcase those people. Engage with them directly on social media and make them a part of your story. They’re people who share in your vision and your passion. That makes them a powerful tool for finding others who share the same outlook.

If you’re showcasing the people who engage with you, they’ll showcase you in return. They’ll talk about you with their friends and create a buzz around your brand. As more people gather around you, you develop an army of likeminded individuals who can attract even more people.

That’s what Kawasaki did as an evangelist for Apple. He showcased Jobs and the company he’d created. In return, Jobs did the same on Kawasaki’s behalf.

You may not get such a huge influencer in your corner from the off. But there are bloggers, fellow speakers, and business owners who’d love to talk about how amazing you are. You may just need to do the same for them to get them started.

Point #4 – Focus on Engaging Your Audience

Many new speakers think their pitch is the focus when they’re on stage. They have something that they want an audience to buy, which means they need to sell it.

That approach may get you a few sales. But it’s not going to get people to emotionally engage with your brand. You’ll only pull in the people who love your product. To build a personal brand, you need people to fall in love with you.

“The purpose of most keynotes is to entertain and inform the audience,” says Kawasaki. “It is seldom intended to provide an opportunity to pitch your product.”

The sale is almost secondary when you’re trying to build a personal brand. The priority is on creating something of value for your audience to care about. That leads to them trusting you.

This trust leads to the sales that you’re looking for.

Point #5 – Build on the Three Pillars

The final point relates to the three pillars that Kawasaki says are essential to building a personal brand:

“The three pillars of a personal brand are trustworthiness, likeability, and competence,” he says.

We’ve covered trustworthiness above. If people don’t think you’re authentic, they’re not going to trust you. You can’t build a personal brand when people don’t think you’re sending a legitimate message.

Likeability is a more abstract concept. Guy’s personal branding success hinges on his personality. He’s an energetic and positive person, which a lot of people love. This pillar is about finding your audience. Figure out who’s going to connect with your story and you have a group of people who’ll like you.

Competence is perhaps the most crucial of the three pillars. You can be the most likeable person in the world. But if you can’t back up your story with credentials, people won’t take you seriously. Showing your competence, or credibility, is also one of the keys to building trust.

Kawasaki succeeds in personal brand building because he focuses on all three pillars.