We built 7 startups, a 9th pan-India podcast on Spotify in 2022 & a Global Top 10 Personal Branding & PR Agency in 2024 & 'publicly' built 1-10,000 YouTube subscribers in 95 days. So if you want to grow your personal brand without guessing what works, join the 250,000+ community!
A lot of founders and professionals assume reputation is a static construct. Almost like a trophy that is won once and then displayed on a shelf for eternity. I have always found that slightly simplistic. What most people actually respond to is not reputation. What they are responding to is perception. Reputation is only the byproduct of perception. And perception is driven by sentiment. In real time.
Let me explain.
25 years ago during my early days at Wipro and then later at IBM, we used to track what competitors were doing through traditional channels, analyst reports and grapevine intelligence. Those days were slow. The feedback loop was quarterly at best. There was no dynamic pulse to measure what the market was saying. Today everything is different.
Social listening has become the modern radar for real time market sensing.
It is not just a marketing hack for agencies. It is a bona fide strategic instrument for founders who want to lead conversations instead of reacting to them.
Last week, Brand24 - the leading global sentiment analysis software became our sponsor. And though it may sound transactional, I see it as category validation.
Because from the first podcast episode in 2021, it was never meant to be a vanity spotlight. The intent was learning. Leadership. Pattern decoding. And if you think about it logically, sentiment is simply pattern recognition at scale.
When Arpita and I launched WellnessFusion as a parallel B2C vertical under Brain Box Catalysts, the principle was similar. Wellness at a high resolution is not one time. It is iterative. You do not meditate once and become "Zen". You track how your mind responds to stimuli, stress, environment, sleep patterns and micro nutritional shifts. The secret is often in the small signals. The sentiment your own mind generates tells you which direction your life is heading. That is self listening. Brand24 does the same for markets.
The new form of personal branding is not projection. It is responsive authority.
People have this old school misconception that personal branding is a content engine. And I have repeatedly said that it's not. It's a self normative leadership perception at scale. And perception is a derivative of what the market feels about you. Which means sentiment is the invisible ingredient.
When people tell me that personal branding is a long game, I agree. But I add one nuance. It is a long game if you are unaware of what is hitting, what is resonating, what is being dismissed. The moment you introduce sentiment tracking, the long game starts compressing. You start seeing pattern loops earlier. You can pivot messaging faster. You can amplify thematic momentum instantly. This is why I call sentiment a leading indicator of authority.
Now let me connect the dots.
Brand24 is a category leader in sentiment analytics and social listening. Their tool tracks mentions across the digital ecosystem, analyses tone, context, volumetric spikes and then surfaces insights that marketers, brand managers and communication heads pay serious attention to. Sentiment is now the strategic commodity of 2026.
Every brand, founder, CXO and leader who wants to build leverage needs to measure the market pulse precisely because buyers now live inside distributed micro communities. Perception shifts can happen overnight because of a single trigger event on X or LinkedIn. The market no longer waits for quarterly reports to change their mind. The market shifts today because attention is fluid.
Attention is the new currency. Sentiment is the new indicator.
And this is why I know that personal branding in 2026 will evolve into a sentiment centric feedback sport. If you want to grow the right audience, you cannot just publish content. You need to measure how the content is affecting perception.
If you want to build trust, you cannot merely post value. You need to track the real response weight. Because trust is not a function of how good you think you are. Trust is a function of how believable your audience feels you are.
I have always maintained that leadership is not about having louder opinions. Leadership is about being deeply aware. A founder who listens will always eventually outperform a founder who only speaks.
As Brain Box Catalyst grows, as Brain Box Gurukul evolves, and as more founders choose to work with us on their personal branding playbooks, we will embed sentiment tracking as a core behavioral discipline. Because this is the only way to build influence with authenticity. You cannot be a leader if you are tone deaf to the system. The system is speaking every day. Our job is to listen.
You'd probably find me talking more about this paradigm next year. Not to promote a tool., but to promote the mindset. Because this mindset is what will differentiate founders who are merely active on LinkedIn from founders who become thought leaders.
Because excellence in brand building is not a function of how loudly you shout. It is a function of how calmly you listen. And listening is the real superpower.
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We built 7 startups, a 9th pan-India podcast on Spotify in 2022 & a Global Top 10 Personal Branding & PR Agency in 2024 & 'publicly' built 1-10,000 YouTube subscribers in 95 days. So if you want to grow your personal brand without guessing what works, join the 250,000+ community!
