When the Leader Becomes the Brand

But for every Edison, there have been countless others whose names didn’t become synonymous with an industry. To better understand why certain people become such influential figures—a “person brand”—in their respective market, Ashlee Humphreys of the Kellogg School of Management and Gillian Brooks of King’s College London examined this phenomenon in the relatively young industry of online news. 

The researchers performed a detailed retrospective on the rise of online news, interviewing experts and diving into online-news databases. As they did, three names emerged above the rest: Matt Drudge of The Drudge Report, Arianna Huffington of The Huffington Post, and Andrew Breitbart of Breitbart.com.  

“In each of these cases, these three people shaped their organization and were kind of like a secret sauce to its success,” says Humphreys, a professor of marketing.  

The researchers uncovered several common characteristics and strategies shared by these media moguls as they rose to prominence in the early days of online news, from the myth behind their rise to how they mobilized their audiences. Ultimately, these factors not only helped the figures become household names in the industry but also helped shape the industry’s future.  

Person brands 

The term “person brands” refers to people who’ve gained fame or cultural importance through marketing, often in association with a particular industry or product. Think Elon Musk, for example, the CEO of Tesla Motors who became one of the faces of electric vehicles. Past research has looked at how these person brands operate within well-established markets, but Humphreys and Brooks realized there was little known about the influence of person brands on emerging markets.  

To address that gap, Humphreys and Brooks decided to examine the role of person brands in the emergence of online news from 1996 to 2012. During that period, as many traditional news outlets like The New York Times were just starting to post their articles online, a new ecosystem of online-only outlets launched, shaking up a centuries-old industry.  

The researchers conducted nearly 100 open-ended ethnographic interviews with people who worked in journalism during that time. Through the interviews, the researchers learned that online news was seen as distinct from traditional news, with different norms, values, and practices.  

They also found that Drudge, Huffington, and Breitbart kept on reappearing as pivotal figures at the dawn of online news. And there was an obvious common thread among the three: they weren’t just founders operating behind the scenes but journalists who had built their outlet’s entire brand and operation around their identity. 

“We were really struck at how profoundly these three people shaped some of those rules early on,” Humphreys says. 

Identity, myth, and audience 

Humphreys and Brooks identified three key factors that led to the rise of the Drudge, Huffington, and Breitbart person brands and allowed them to shape the news market.  

The first was that all three founders created strong individual identities for their organizations by leveraging their personal social capital.  

For instance, Arianna Huffington already knew and socialized with many high-status liberal personalities prior to launching The Huffington Post. So by the time she launched the site, she was able to position it as a politically liberal outlet by convincing those high-status personalities to write for her. Breitbart similarly leveraged connections with conservative figures, and Drudge with his connections as a reporter.  

It’s not just that the people behind person brands had charisma, says Humphreys, or that they had a lot of connections; they also had valuable connections they were able to leverage. 

The second common strategy of the person brands was to construct what Humphreys calls a founding myth: a story (whether true or not) about who they were, how they came to be, and how they worked.  

For example, Matt Drudge made his name by breaking the Bill Clinton sex-scandal story in 1998 before any other traditional outlet. The legend is that he did so by hanging around the Newsweek offices and listening to rumors that more-traditional journalists weren’t ready to write about. His actions, in turn, helped shape the expectation that gossip and rumor were fair game for his website—and other online-news outlets. 

Finally, these person brands not only found large audiences and created content that resonated with those readers, but they also mobilized their audience to provide funding and cocreate content. Breitbart and Drudge used tips (and in some cases even reporting) provided by audience members, and Huffington leaned hard into using reader comments as content. 

Scandal, speed, and attention 

Humphreys and Brooks then pulled hard data about these person brands, including how people viewed them and how the brands influenced online news. The researchers looked at how other media outlets covered The Drudge Report, The Huffington Post, and Breitbart.com, focusing on the words most often used to describe either these brands in particular or online news in general.  

“Are they words like ‘truth’ and ‘trust’? Or are they words like ‘scandal’ and ‘fast’ and ‘money’?” says Humphreys.  

They found that people perceived the three news sites differently than the way they viewed more-established newspapers and news outlets. The three new sites were described more often with words related to scandal, speed, and attention than were traditional outlets. And because these sites were so influential, the expectation became that “this is what online news is: it’s fast, it’s unverified,” Humphreys says. “And so that set up the new norms for the industry.” 

Together, these factors helped shape how people thought of online news as a whole. And the three person brands ultimately laid down a path that many other journalists and news personalities followed.  

Building a person brand 

Humphreys says that their research also offers lessons for managers at companies seeking to develop or get more value out of a person brand, or for ambitious founders who want to influence an entire emerging industry—not just one company. 

Managers working for a traditional brand can try to harness the advantages of person brands by identifying and elevating key contributors within the existing organization, notes Humphreys. Political commentator Ezra Klein rose to prominence through his branded blog Wonkblog at The Washington Post, for instance, eventually allowing the organization to reap the benefits of his person brand within their own brand. 

Managers can also turn to their audience to build up a person brand as well. Consumers have considerable power in shaping emerging markets, especially as early supporters of organizations. “If there’s an emerging market where you [as a consumer] really love an organization, your support really does ladder up to something,” says Humphreys.  

A common challenge for person brand-based companies is figuring out how to maintain the brand’s identity after the original person brand retires, moves to a competitor, or otherwise leaves the public eye. One strategy might be to find other person brands connected to their organization and delegate or promote them as needed. “For example, with Breitbart handing leadership off to Steve Bannon,” says Humphreys. “Bannon was equally a person brand and kind of carried the mantle” after Breitbart’s passing in 2012. 

Of course, it’s always good to kick the tires before settling on a new person brand. Person brands can be very convincing, says Humphreys, but there are many historical examples where their actual product or service wasn’t up to snuff.  

In fact, Humphreys is now interested in looking at more historical examples where person brands weren’t able to move the market. That might help further distinguish the qualities that helped person brands like Huffington, Drudge, or Breitbart succeed where others didn’t. She’s also interested in how person brands are playing out right now in the emerging market of generative AI. 

The big lesson, when thinking about how brands affect the world: “Don’t count out the people [who represent them],” says Humphreys. “They can really change society.”