When Arne Slot arrived at Liverpool Football Club and steadily built towards a title-winning debut season, it felt like a case study in modern leadership and branding. So much so in fact I wrote about it for Campaign Middle East.
Slot came across as humble, calm and composed. He was a clear, and seemingly natural, shift away from Klopp’s high-octane emotional, and at times draining, omnipresence.
At the time, the lesson for personal branding felt obvious. You don’t need to replicate what came before you. You need to re-interpret it in your own way and be authentic by bringing something true to you, not a carbon copy of one of your predecessors.
Fast forward12 months and there’s a lesson that’s a little less comfortable … especially for Liverpool supporters like me. What’s been happening to Slot over the last few months makes arguably an even more interesting case study. Personal branding is easy to admire when things are working and much harder to sustain when they’re not.
What we’re seeing now isn’t just a team going through a rough patch. It’s a leadership brand being tested in real time. It’s showing how quickly things can start to fray when the environment changes and the response doesn’t seem to keep up and evolve.
There’s a tendency in marketing to treat personal branding as a fixed asset. Something you define early, articulate clearly and then consistently deliver against again and again. The issue is much like the momentum shifts and random occurrences that happen during 90 minutes of a football match, leadership doesn’t operate in a closed system, immune from external and internal factors, many of which are beyond control.
Peter Jacob, Managing Director, MENAT, Current Global on Cannes Lions jury room and Arne Slot
Peter Jacob, Managing Director, Current Global MENAT
Markets shift. People change. Competition gets better. Trump posts. Tragedy happens. Form dips. People join. People leave. Boards have different agendas. Before you know it, what worked six months ago doesn’t quite work in the same way. Even worse, the very same traits that once felt like superpowers, start to become a unique form of personal branding kryptonite.
Slot’s style was built on control and clarity. It worked well but then gradually as performances became more and more inconsistent, Slot’s Liverpool have been accused of being too safe, too predictable, too inflexible and too much the polar opposite of Klopp’s Liverpool.
The best personal brands don’t just stand for something, they respond to something by moving with context, flexing under pressure and always evolving. What works and gets attention at the start is rarely what sustains things further down the line.
One of the most telling signs things are going a little bit pear-shaped is negative internal noise. When team members start questioning the voice behind the strategy, that’s not just dressing-room frustration, it’s a sign that something deeper isn’t landing.
We’ve all seen it. A leader with a strong, well-articulated strategy that looks great on a deck, starts to feel detached from the business by the people on the front lines. Those are the people who are being asked to bring that very same strategy to life. If your team doesn’t believe it or feel it, your personal brand is ruined, results are inevitably impacted, investors and loyal fans start to lose faith.
What’s interesting is that nothing about Slot’s original positioning was wrong. In fact, it was exactly what Liverpool needed. Personal brands don’t fail because they start in the wrong place, they struggle when they stay in the same place for too long and start to feel stale and fixed.
What starts to emerge in hindsight isn’t about tactical decisions but something far more fundamental. It is a real sense that the whole corporate ecosystem is slightly out of balance and the person at the top is seemingly unable, or unwilling, to change or try something new.
Personal branding and leadership don’t live in arrival mode, they live under pressure, in setbacks and in moments when the original plan can’t work anymore.
At the start things like vision, mission, messaging and narratives define what a leader or a brand stand for. A lot of time is spent on refining these words, stress testing them and articulating them. Yet we’re all guilty of spending much less time thinking about how these things need to evolve.
Anyone can look well-positioned when things are working, but the real test isn’t how you show up at the start, it’s how you adapt when things stop going to plan.
At the time of writing Slot is holding on to his job but one wonders how much longer he can survive without quickly adapting his personal brand attributes to the new realities he and his team are facing.
YNWA.
By Peter Jacob, Managing Director, Current Global MENAT