And we are back on the wagon for 8 pm EST! We haven't been laid out by dysentery or measles. Thank god. Yes, I am giving a shoutout to the Oregon Trail, but that's where the nostalgia stops. Now it's time for the bizzzzness.

Two things on my mind this week:

First, I keep getting cornered on the personal brand question. “What happens if we build up our people and they leave?" I've answered this one before, and I'm going to keep answering it until people stop asking, because the mentality behind the question is the actual problem. Building someone's voice while they work for you isn't a risk you're taking on. It's the job.

Second, nobody's talking about brand anymore. I've sat through demo after demo, panel after panel, watched the entire industry sprint toward agentic everything, and not one person has said the word "taste." Not once. I love AI. I live in Claude more than I live in most of my actual tools. But if the endgame is marketing that's technically correct and completely forgettable, I want no part of it.

The stuff that actually differentiates you, whether it's a person's voice or a brand's point of view, can't be automated, templated, or protected. It only works if you're brave enough to let it out into the world.

So yah. Let's get into it.

♥️ kyle

Should You Build Your Employees’ Personal Brands?

TL;DR - Yes. Yes, you should. 

I've talked to a few people over the last few weeks about the importance of building personal brands for employees and executives, and multiple times I've heard some version of the same objection: 

"We shouldn't be investing in our employees' personal brand. What happens if they leave?"

I've written about this before, more than once, because it keeps showing up and it still bugs me every time. My favorite line when I'm introducing someone new to the marketing team I’m lucky to ser is this: 

“After working with this group, you will never have to use your resume to get a job again.”

I mean that. I think it's part of my job to teach people how to build a personal brand, not hoard the spotlight. And I think the company brand should be genuinely supportive of that, not threatened by it. Employee advocacy is almost as important as customer advocacy. Almost.

I was on a call recently, and this exact objection came up. Someone on the team had floated the idea that they shouldn't "juice up" the personal brands of their people because, well, they might get poached. I told him flat out that mentality is dangerous. If someone builds a real personal brand while representing your company, and they eventually get hired away because they're excellent at what they do, that's not a loss. 

That's you doing your job right. 

Oh and, it can't just be one person carrying the whole company's public voice. Everyone should be building something, even if there's a clear primary face out front. If that's not happening on your team, you need to go change the mentality.

So yah... this has been on my mind lately, partly because of a conversation with a journalist at Fast Company, and partly because it's just become a real thing we deal with at Docebo every week.

At Docebo, I work alongside people who have built real audiences. Our CRO, Mark Kosoglow, has a following that most marketers would kill for. Our CEO, Alessio, is building a presence that's beginning to shape how the market views AI-powered learning. Our Chief People Officer, Lauren, is in the mix too. And we actively support TWO podcasts run by employees and it’s all their personal brands, not Docebos. 

Then there's me, doing whatever this is every Sunday night.

Personal brand aren’t separate from company brand. They ARE the company brand. When Mark posts about the future of revenue leadership, people associate that thinking with Docebo. When Alessio talks about the AI era, it reinforces our positioning in ways a press release never will. The trust someone builds with an audience over years... it transfers. And recruiting. Honestly, the single most consistent source of great talent I've found is LinkedIn. People want to work for leaders they've been following. That's not theoretical. I've watched it happen.

So if you're managing people with real audiences and you're treating that as a liability or a distraction, I'd push back pretty hard on that.

On How You Actually Build One

Okay, but "encourage your people to build a personal brand" is useless advice on its own. Everyone nods at that in the all-hands and then goes back to never posting. So let's get specific, because I think the "how" is where most of this falls apart.

First, kill the idea that you need a system before you start. I don't have a content calendar. I don't have a ghostwriter. I don't have some AI queue quietly pumping out posts on my behalf. I post when I actually have something to say, and I try to write it in a way that makes it worth someone's time to stop scrolling. 

If you're waiting to build the perfect process before you post your first thing, you'll wait forever. Write what you'd tell a friend. The process can come later, if it comes at all.

Second, get specific instead of vague. Vague thought leadership is invisible. Nobody remembers "AI is changing marketing." People remember the exact story, the exact number, the exact moment that made you believe it. If you're coaching someone on your team through this, the fastest unlock isn't a writing tip, it's asking them "okay, but what actually happened?"

Third, treat it like a conversation, not a presentation. The posts and the sections that do nothing are the ones written like a press release. The ones that land are the ones that sound like you're talking to one specific person, not broadcasting to an audience.

Fourth, don't be afraid of a sharper hook. This one took me a while to accept. You can respect your reader and still earn the first three seconds of their attention. Those aren't in conflict.

And fifth, consistency beats perfection, every time. You don't need a framework to be consistent. You need to enjoy it enough that it becomes a habit instead of a chore.

That's the individual level. But if you're doing this across a team, there's one more layer. 

Pick two or three themes each person actually has the right to own, not just whatever's trending that week. And commit to a cadence, even a loose one. Consistency is what separates insight from noise, and it's what separates leaders from participants. Without that structure, you end up with a team full of good instincts and nothing to show for it.

None of this requires a big program. It requires you to stop treating your people's voice like something to manage down, and start treating it like something worth building on purpose.

Don’t Be Bland as F***

This is a copy from my LinkedIn post and subsequent article on Pavilion’s Topline. 

Everyone has the same tools now. The only edge left is the one thing you can’t prompt into existence: taste.

Nobody’s Talking about Brand Anymore

I know I risk our future AI gods reading this at some point and annihilating my entire family because of my opinion, but YOLO. Brand wins.

In every single demo, event, and conversation I’ve had recently about the evolution of GTM and AI, there was not one mention of brand. Not one mention of taste. Not one mention of the power of human-driven creativity.

Not one.

I’m not against AI. We’re building agentic workflows at Docebo. I spend more time in Claude than I do in most other tools. I believe AI transformation is real and that the companies that ignore it will pay for that choice.

But there’s a version of that transformation that terrifies me. The one where marketing gets reduced to a growth function, or even worse, a function that reports to sales or product. Optimized to scale and engineered to be bland as f*ck. Where the output is technically correct, statistically average, and completely forgettable.

If that’s where this is going, I’m out. You can call me old. You can call me traditional. 

But I’m going to call the blind shift to all-out AI a mistake. 

Humans as the Moat 

Every major technological shift in history has flattened execution and sharpened the importance of human judgment. The printing press democratized text. The internet democratized distribution. And AI is democratizing production.

When everyone has the same tools, the only competitive advantage you have left is the human.

But… not the human as a checkbox. And not as part of the approval workflow. The human as the source of something the machine literally cannot generate: genuine taste, genuine point of view, genuine creative courage.

That’s the moat. And most companies are bulldozing it.

Consensus Isn’t Quality

I keep coming back to the same argument I had with Adam Singer: Most brands don’t have a compliance problem. No, their problem is lack of taste. They’ve mistaken consensus for quality. They’ve run their work through so many layers of approval that by the time it reaches the market, every edge has been sanded off. Adam calls it the “blandification” of marketing. I don’t have a better word for it.

The result is a market full of sameness. Same messaging structure. Same visual language. Same LinkedIn posts. Same event booths, same generic swag.

And now AI can replicate that sameness at 10x the speed.

Congratulations! We’ve successfully industrialized mediocrity.

“Brand vs. Demand” Is a Needless Distraction

Drew Brucker put it simply when we talked on my podcast: “Brand is a controllable moat. Features can be copied. Ads can be outbid. But brand? It’s how you get on the shortlist. It’s how you get remembered.”

The irony is that most operators still roll their eyes at the word “brand,” even as they wonder why their win rates are dropping and their pipeline velocity is slowing.

Here’s what I’ve learned from 15 years of running marketing: the “brand vs. demand” debate is the dumbest argument in the building. They’re not two budget lines. Nor are they competing priorities. They’re the same investment, measured at different time horizons.

Take, for instance, an event: It drives pipeline, builds perception, and helps you to retain customers. It also creates content that runs for six months. Asking whether that’s “brand spend” or “demand spend” is a waste of time, because it’s both, and calling it one or the other is a distraction from the actual work.

Don’t screw around. The real question you should be asking your team: Do your customers believe you’re the best at what you do? And is that belief showing up in win rates, deal size, and retention?

If not, you don’t need more attribution software or a cool AI agent. You might need better taste.

Taste Is The One Thing That Doesn’t Have a Vendor. 

You can’t buy it. You can’t template it. You can’t prompt it into existence. It’s discipline, judgment, and the courage to make choices that most people in your building are too afraid to make.

I wrote the 10 Laws of Good Taste last year, and the one that keeps resonating: Taste isn’t decoration. It’s substance embedded in every single decision. It shows up in the event’s lighting, the copy on your landing page, the follow-up email after a customer call, the way your sales deck flows. 

Anywhere there’s a decision, taste either shows up or it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, your customers feel it. They can’t always pinpoint why, but they feel something is off. And “something is off” is not a place you can run a growth function from.

When Production Becomes Cheap and Fast, What Becomes Rare Is Creative Conviction.

Who’s going to win in this race to the blandest? Not the organizations that automate the fastest! It’s those leaders who know what their company stands for clearly enough to make every automated output feel human. That requires a core narrative, and a real point of view. Someone willing to say “this is boring and we’re not shipping it,” even when the calendar says otherwise.

That’s a human job. It will always be a human job.

Protecting Taste Is the Job Now.

Rick Rubin can’t play an instrument. But he’s produced some of the most iconic records of our time, because he knows what moving feels like and has the conviction to protect it. That skill doesn’t degrade in an AI world. It becomes more valuable.

I’m building AI into everything I do. My team runs AI Build Days. We’re deploying agents. We’re building faster than we ever have.

And I’m more convinced than ever that none of it matters if we don’t know what we’re saying, why it matters, and how it should feel to the people on the other side of it.

Because agentic efficiency in service of bland output is just fast mediocrity.

The most important thing a marketing leader can do right now is not figure out which AI tools to deploy, but instead, build a culture where taste is protected, creativity is defended, and the human voice inside the work is treated as a strategic asset, not an inefficiency to be optimized away.

Brand is not a budget line. It’s the last moat you have, and the humans are the ones who build it.

While machines will get faster, they will never get taste. 

So don’t give yours away.