Missing Trust in the Branding Theatre
There are about 400 million registered companies in the world. The number of products definitely exceeds the human population. It is indeed a very noisy World. LinkedIn and Instagram are choked with ads. Every post itself seems like an advertisement. The world has convinced you that posting about yourself will get you likes and validation that’ll make you feel good about yourself. Same goes for startups or companies i.e. if attention is scarce, companies are pushing out more content.
In a world of abundance, trust concentrates. You can’t keep your customers or employees in the dark for long. The sad part about company building is that it seems to be following the same trajectory as content: from long-form depth to short-form optics. Building a company used to mean obsessing over the product, understanding customers, and sweating the details. Increasingly, it seems to mean optimising for podcast appearances and personal branding. That’s one reason we see so many zombie companies and companies shutting down today. Company building is now a bucket list.
Most TOMA funnels choke at awareness, and rightfully so. The amount of low-quality content competing for attention keeps growing and will keep growing. There was a time when companies would obsess over an idea and come up with campaigns such as Think Different (still one of my favourites) around it. Today, every fundraising announcement looks the same: founder photo op, folded hands, same caption “Thrilled to announce…” No thought involved at all. We mimic each other until everything starts looking the same.
A company I came across recently I know for a fact purchased a certificate for being one of the best workplaces to work for. All employees of that company started to post and repost it as soon as the post was out. If any smart individual were considering joining that company, I doubt that certificate would be where they stop. Sure, it’s a good source of content for getting top-of-mind attention. But downstream, I’d immediately open Glassdoor or AmbitionBox. And if you do open one of the pages for that company, you see something very different. This is the latest comment by one of their employees. You’ll find several more. Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.
One of my relatives recently started a company and bootstrapped it entirely. He’s already in the top 4% globally by revenue, without a single LinkedIn post.I’m no branding expert, but you definitely feel it in your gut when you see too much branding. A brand is not what you post on LinkedIn. It is when your customers know they will be refunded when you mess up and will prevent similar instances in future. It is what your employees say when leadership isn’t in the room. It is what a company does when doing the right thing isn’t the easiest. It is what your customers feel over time. It is NOT an AI-slop post that you ask everyone in your company to repost. You can manufacture visibility.You can manufacture content. You can purchase a certificate. You can’t manufacture trust.
PS : Since Jan 2026, I’m starting to see an increasing viewership on my posts from Singapore and United States. Feel free to reach out if I can be of any help.