For years, personal brands dominated. Build an audience, show up consistently, be authentic, and you could compete with businesses ten times your size. It worked across LinkedIn thought leadership, TikTok creators, podcast hosts, and solo consultants building entire client bases from content alone.
But something has shifted. Brand sentiment is rising for the first time in years. The Edelman Trust Barometer found trust in brands climbed from 56% in 2022 to 68% in 2025, making brands the most trusted institution measured, ahead of media, government, and NGOs. Consumer trust in advertising jumped 8 points in a single year. Net brand trust hit its highest point in the nine-year tracking series.
So what changed?
Everyone’s a marketer now, and it shows
The tools that once gave individuals an edge are now available to everyone. AI can generate a LinkedIn post, a podcast outline, a month of social content, and a brand strategy document in an afternoon. The barrier to producing marketing content has essentially disappeared.
The result is a flood. Online mentions of “AI slop” surged ninefold to 2.4 million in 2026, with 82% of that sentiment being negative. Merriam-Webster named it their 2025 Word of the Year. Audiences are developing what researchers call “scroll immunity,” skipping content entirely without engaging, because so much of it feels interchangeable.
When everyone can produce content at speed, content alone stops being the differentiator. And when personal brands across every platform are using the same tools to say broadly the same things in broadly the same formats, the authenticity that made them compelling starts to feel manufactured too.
The personal brand formula has peaked
Forbes reported this year that the curated headshot and performed vulnerability formula has “hit saturation point.” The top creators now resemble the institutions they were supposed to be the alternative to, and creator burnout sits between 62-90%, with agencies calling it one of their biggest supply chain risks.
Meanwhile, 64% of social media users aged 18-40 unfollowed or muted at least one influencer in the past year because of inauthentic content (Pew Research Center, 2026). Audiences aren’t turning against people. They’re turning against the performance of authenticity, which is a different thing entirely.
Forbes’ research into what they called “curated authenticity” found that audiences don’t want more access or more behind-the-scenes content. They want coherence: a clear story, consistent values, and the sense that what a brand or person communicates actually connects to something real. Content that was “real but random, an oversharing stream of signals without a unifying story” muddled perception rather than building trust.
Why brand sentiment is the beneficiary
This is where brand sentiment picks up. When individuals have every tool available to create marketing but lack the strategic infrastructure to make it meaningful, properly built brands stand out by contrast.
Edelman’s 2026 report describes an “insular trust mindset” held by 70% of the global population. People are narrowing their circles, retreating to what feels safe and familiar. Morning Consult calls it “the reassurance economy,” with the biggest brand trust risers being nostalgic favourites. Consumers want to feel calm, confident, and clear on what a business stands for, what it delivers, and whether it can be relied on.
A brand that has invested in its positioning, its values, its customer experience, and its voice can offer that. An individual producing content with AI tools and good intentions often can’t, because the work that builds genuine sentiment isn’t the content itself. It’s everything behind it: the strategy, the consistency, the follow-through, and the willingness to actually stand for something beyond personal visibility.
Lo-fi content and brand comments prove the point
It’s worth noting that the content performing best right now is lo-fi: unpolished, human, shot on a phone. TikTok lo-fi ads get 32% higher watch-through rates. Raw Reels beat studio content by 20%. This isn’t about production value dropping. It’s about audiences rewarding content that feels like a real person made it, not a template.
The brand comments trend shows this working at scale. Wendy’s replying “your dignity” when asked how much a Big Mac costs. Duolingo recreating Severance scenes with deadpan accuracy. Ryanair roasting its own legroom. These work because there’s clearly a real person behind the account and the audience is in on the joke. The brand provides the structure and credibility. The person behind the account provides the humanity. Neither works without the other.
What this means going forward
Building a brand in 2026 is harder, not easier. Being authentic requires intentional work: defining values, building credibility, navigating AI and shifting consumer expectations, maintaining consistency across every touchpoint. The brands earning trust right now aren’t the ones that stopped trying. They’re the ones putting the strategic work in that most individuals simply don’t have the infrastructure to sustain.
The personal brand era taught audiences what good communication looks like. But now that everyone has the tools to communicate, the question has moved on from “can you show up?” to “what are you actually building?” And that’s a question that favours brands with substance behind them.