Personal Branding Podcast

About Personal Branding Podcast

Join Bernard Kelvin Clive, Africa's foremost authority on Personal Branding, weekly discussions and interviews on Personal Branding | Personal Development | Publishing |

Publisher

Bernard Kelvin Clive

Category

business · education

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

16 May 2016

Latest episode

26 Jul 2026

Latest episodes

11 of 185 episodes have a transcript.

1. 

   26 Jul 2026TRANSCRIPT

   Visibility Without Value Is Vanity

   Host Bernard Kelvin Clive interviews industry experts on how targeted visibility and genuine value build lasting brands, not just follower counts.

2. 

   22 Jun 2026

   Technology: The Brand Game Changer

   The Brand Game Changer “The world is fast changing, and until you learn to adapt and adjust to stand out from the masses, you will fade into oblivion.” — Bernard Kelvin Clive A few months ago, my team was racing against the clock to prepare for an event. The kind of preparation where everything that can wait, waits, and everything that can’t lands on your table at the same time. One of the things on that table was a flyer. We needed it fast, and we needed it good. So we did what we’ve always done. We engaged an external designer, sent over the brief, and gave them roughly twenty-four hours to turn it around. Fair enough. Twenty-four hours for a professional flyer, with the event breathing down our necks, felt reasonable. The designer came back with a sample. Our events team, the ones who live and breathe the small details, started going through it the way event people do. “I don’t like this here.” “Can we move that there?” “This colour isn’t speaking.” Normal back and forth. We sent the corrections across, and the designer told us to expect the update in a few hours, maybe the full twenty-four again. While we were waiting, something happened that none of us saw coming. The Unexpected Change One of my team members, Maame Esi Yamoah, has zero background in graphic design. Not a single class, not a single late-night tutorial on Photoshop, nothing. What she does have is a habit of playing around with ChatGPT’s image generation, prompting it for fun, testing it out the way some people test out a new recipe on a slow weekend. She quietly opened the tool, typed in what she had in mind, and in two to five minutes, she had her own version of the flyer. She dropped it in the group chat almost as an afterthought. No big introduction. No “look what I made.” Just, here, what do you think? And the room shifted. “Oh, this is getting better,” someone said. The design went up alongside the one the professional was still working on, and both were sent to the people in charge for a final decision. Here’s the part that humbled me. Almost everyone pointed to the AI-generated flyer. Not the one a trained designer with years of experience had produced. The one a beginner with no design background had built in under five minutes, using a tool she’d only been practicing with for a few months. The designer came back hours later with the revised version, exactly as promised. The team looked at it, looked at Maame’s version again, and still chose hers. When more corrections were needed on her design, those corrections took minutes to apply. Not hours. Minutes. That flyer, the one built by someone with no formal design training, was the one that eventually went out. The one we used for the event. I sat with that for a while. It’s Not Really About AI We keep having this conversation about whether AI will take our jobs, and at this point, I find it a slightly lazy conversation. Here’s what I think is closer to the truth: AI is not coming for your job because it’s AI. It’s coming for the job of anyone who has quietly stopped growing in their own field. A skill that isn’t being sharpened becomes a skill that gets replaced. That’s not AI’s fault. That’s just what happens to anything that stands still while everything around it keeps moving. Think about what actually happened in that story. On one side, a designer with years, maybe two decades, of professional training and tools behind her work. On the other side, someone with zero design background and a few months of curious, consistent practice with a new tool. And curiosity won the vote in the boardroom. Not credentials. Not years of experience. Curiosity, practice, and a willingness to explore something new, against twenty years of mastery using the old way. That should sit somewhere a little uncomfortable for all of us, myself included. And it wasn’t only about technical execution either. What won the vote wasn’t just that Maame’s flyer was produced faster. It was that, somehow, it carried a feel the team responded to. The eye for what looks right, what we like to call “taste,” used to be something you built slowly, over years of training, critique, and exposure. Now a beginner with a sharp instinct and a good prompt can put that instinct on the table next to twenty years of formal craft, and the room doesn’t automatically choose the twenty years. That tells you taste itself is being democratized alongside speed, and that’s a much bigger shift than one flyer. Speed Is Now Part of the Brand Now let’s talk about speed, because that’s really the second half of this story, and I think it might be the more important half for your brand. It was taking our designer roughly twenty-four hours to turn around one update. Every fresh correction added more hours to that clock. Meanwhile, the AI-generated design was being corrected and re-corrected inside five-minute windows. We weren’t just comparing quality at that point. We were comparing speed of service, and speed of service is no longer a nice-to-have sitting somewhere below quality on your list of priorities. It is fast becoming part of the brand experience itself. Think about what that means for the way you serve your own clients and customers. The market is being trained, daily, to expect ideas to move from concept to something tangible almost instantly. Someone has an idea in the morning, and by afternoon they have a working draft, a mockup, a flyer, a landing page, a pitch deck, something they can react to and refine. That used to take days. Sometimes weeks. Now it can take an afternoon, sometimes less. As a brand strategist, I have to take this seriously. Clients are not just comparing your finished work against another brand’s finished work anymore. They are comparing how long it took to get there. A client who has seen a flyer turned around in five minutes by their own staff will quietly start measuring your agency, your studio, your consultancy against that five minutes, whether they say it out loud or not. Turnaround time has quietly become part of your brand promise, alongside quality, price, and trust. Ignore that at your own risk. And this isn’t only about design. The same thing is happening with copywriting, with prototyping, with idea development generally. The moment a concept drops in the mind of an entrepreneur or a business owner, a digital prototype can be built almost immediately, tested, even pre-promoted, long before it would have traditionally reached a designer’s or a developer’s desk. That cuts out days, sometimes weeks, of manually sourcing a designer, a copywriter, a developer, just to test whether an idea even has legs. Let me give you a small example; I was working on a project that needed a fair amount of manual processing. I set up an AI agent, gave it the tools it needed, and left to drop my kids off at school. By the time I got back, the task was done. Not started. Done. Hours of work that would normally have had me sitting behind a screen, manually pushing through, were handled while I was doing something else entirely with my morning. Right prompt, right tools, right setup. I share that not to make a case for any one tool, but to make a point about time. Time saved is value created. And in branding and business, value created eventually shows up as money earned, or money lost to someone who got there faster than you did. What This Means For Your Brand So here’s what I want you to sit with, if you’re an entrepreneur, a coach, a brand owner, or someone trying to build something that lasts. I see versions of this story everywhere now. Young creatives without formal training are quietly outpacing established studios on speed and on output, simply because they treat these tools as part of their daily hustle rather than something to be cautious about. Established players who would never have considered themselves “behind” five years ago are starting to feel the ground shift under them. This is not a Silicon Valley story happening somewhere far away. It is happening in our markets, on our streets, inside our own teams, right now. This is no longer a “wait and see” moment. It’s a “get in the pool or get left standing on the side” moment. Somewhere on your team, or on your competitor’s team, there’s a Maame Esi Yamoah quietly experimenting with a tool after hours, building a skill that doesn’t show up on a CV but absolutely shows up in the output. The only real question is whether that person is on your team, building your brand forward, or somewhere else, quietly doing the work you used to charge for. I’ll be honest with you, not everything coming out of these tools right now is excellent. Go online, and you’ll find plenty of design work that’s sloppy, plenty of writing that reads as if nobody refined it. That’s true, and it’s worth saying out loud so we don’t pretend this is all polished already. But that’s not really the point. The point is the trajectory, not the current imperfection. A year ago, what Maame did in five minutes wasn’t possible the way it is today. A year from now, it will be even faster and even better. The tools are climbing. The only real question is whether you’re climbing with them. Mastering these tools is no longer optional homework for “tech people,” while the rest of us focus on “the real work.” The tools have become part of the real work now, whatever field you’re in. Design, writing, coaching, consulting, sales, accounting, it doesn’t matter. The tools are already being mastered and used by someone in that field, right now, while you’re reading this. The earlier you put your ear to the ground, explore, adapt, and build the habit of working alongside these tools, the better positioned your brand will be. If you sit this one out, you won’t be sitting it out quietly. You’ll be sitting it out while someone else, possibly someone with far less experience than you, takes the work right out from under you. What stays with me most about that whole flyer episode isn’t really about AI at all. It’s about Maame. She wasn’t trying to prove anything or replace anyone. She was simply curious, and she practiced that curiosity quietly, on her own time, with no pressure on her to perform. That curiosity, more than any design certificate, is what decided whose work ended up on the banner for our event. That, to me, is the real lesson for your brand. The differentiator going forward will not always be who trained the longest or who has the most letters after their name. Increasingly, it will be who is practicing right now, today, with the tools already reshaping their field. Training tells you where someone started. Practice tells you where they’re headed. And in a market moving at this pace, where someone is headed matters a great deal more than where they started. So get involved. Get moving with the tools and the technology already living inside your field, and let your brand build on top of that, not in spite of it. Everything is more possible now than it has ever been. Creatable, testable, workable, almost instantly. Just explore. Think about this, as an entrepreneur, as a coach, as a brand: how are you going to move your business forward with what’s already sitting right in front of you? The best is yours.

3. 

   18 May 2026

   They Named It!

   Why Brand Names Matter More Than You Think Let me tell you something my kids taught me — completely by accident — that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about in terms of branding and business. We have neighbours who keep rare, exotic chickens. A beautiful bird, a cross-breed you don’t see often around here. One day, one of those chickens somehow found its way over the fence and into our compound. We tried to coax it back. We tried guiding it toward the gate. The thing simply refused to move. It just walked around, pecking at the ground, completely unbothered, acting like it had been living with us all its life. We didn’t stress too much about it. We figured we’d let the neighbour know and get it sorted. But then the kids came home from school. That changed everything. They spotted the chicken and immediately went into full excitement mode — chasing it gently, offering it water, watching it strut around. By the next morning, the chicken was still there. Day two, same thing. Day three, same. Our neighbour knew the bird had crossed over, but it seemed content to stay. And the kids? The kids had fully adopted it. Then one evening, I overheard a conversation between my two children. One of them said something like, “Let’s go and see Arrey.” I stopped. I thought they were talking about going somewhere or seeing someone. I came out and asked what was happening, reminding them they weren’t going anywhere at that time of day. They laughed and said, “Dad, we’re not going anywhere. We’re going to see Arrey. The chicken.” They had given the chicken a name. Arrey. Not “the chicken.” Not “the bird from next door.” Not “that thing in the yard.” A proper name. A specific, chosen, deliberate name. And with that name came a whole new world. Suddenly the chicken had a personality in their conversations. It had a story. They could refer to it, remember it, talk about it to others, and feel a connection to it that no generic description could have created. “Names don’t just label things — they give them life, identity, and a place in someone’s memory.” How Children Understand What Brands Need to Learn Here is what struck me the most: our neighbour raised those chickens. He feeds them, tends to them, and has had them for years. But as far as I know, none of them had individual names. They were chickens — a category, not individuals. My children, in three days, gave one of those chickens an identity that neither the owner nor the bird’s original environment had provided. And from that moment, it wasn’t just a chicken. It was Arrey. Children do this instinctively. They name their toys, their stuffed animals, their imaginary friends, even their fears. They name things so they can hold them, remember them, and make meaning out of them. I noticed that almost every toy in our home has a name. They don’t refer to “the red car” or “the big bear.” Each one has its own name, and in the world of their play and imagination, those names carry weight. As adults in business, we sometimes forget this instinct. We get so focused on product specs, service descriptions, and category labels that we neglect the one thing that transforms a product from a commodity into a brand — the name. Think about it. What’s more powerful: “a search engine” or “Google”? “A streaming service” or “Netflix”? “A ride” or “an Uber”? The category explains what something is. The name gives it a world. What a Name Actually Does for Your Brand A name is not decoration. It is not an afterthought. A name is the first act of brand identity — it is the anchor around which everything else is built. Research in branding and consumer psychology consistently shows that brand recall — the ability of a customer to bring your name to mind without any prompting — is directly connected to purchasing decisions. When someone is asked to name a fast-food restaurant, a cola brand, or a courier service, the names that come up first win the sale. Not the ones with the most features. Not the ones with the lowest price. The ones that are remembered. According to brand awareness studies, most consumers can only spontaneously recall between three and five brand names in any given product category. That is your competition for space in a customer’s memory. The name you choose, and how well you build around it, determines whether you make that short list. A strong name does several things at once. It signals what you stand for. It triggers an emotional response. It simplifies the conversation a customer has to have when recommending you to someone else. And critically, it makes it easier for people to come back to you — because they can actually find you in their own memory. Think about when you’ve referred a business to a friend. What did you say? “There’s this place — I can’t remember the name exactly, but they do…” versus “You have to try XYZ.” The first is a weak referral. The second sells. The name is what makes word-of-mouth work. “The name you choose is not just what people call you. It is what they carry of you in their minds.” The Emotional Weight of the Right Name There is something else my children showed me that goes beyond memory. When they named that chicken Arrey, they started caring about it differently. They checked on it in the morning. They talked about it at the dinner table. They were upset when the neighbour finally found a way to lure it back home. A name creates attachment. And attachment is what drives loyalty. This is not just childhood psychology — it is human psychology. When something has a name, we relate to it differently. We invest in it emotionally. We feel a sense of familiarity and connection that a product description alone can never create. In branding, this emotional dimension is everything. Apple doesn’t just sell computers — it sells a sense of identity. Coca-Cola doesn’t just sell a drink — it sells a feeling of happiness and togetherness. Nike doesn’t just sell shoes — it sells the story of what you could become. And every one of those experiences starts with a name — a name that over time has been loaded with meaning, memory, and emotion. When you name your business or product well, you give your customers something to carry with them. A reference point. A feeling. A conversation starter. A name they reach for without thinking when they need what you offer. And when you name it poorly — or not at all — you leave them with nothing to hold on to. You become “that company” or “you know, those people who do the thing.” You become forgettable, even if your product is excellent. Naming Is a Business Decision, Not a Creative Exercise I have spoken before about rules and principles in brand naming — including the rule of three that I have shared in previous pieces. Today I want to anchor on something even more foundational: the decision to take naming seriously in the first place. Many businesses treat naming as an afterthought. They pick something available, something easy to spell, or something that just “sounds fine.” And then they spend years trying to build equity into a name that is working against them rather than for them. A name that is hard to pronounce creates friction. A name that means something unintended in your customer’s language creates confusion. A name that is too generic fails to differentiate. A name that sounds too similar to a competitor creates legal and brand clarity problems. But a name that is clear, memorable, emotionally resonant, and authentic to what you do? That name becomes an asset. It compounds over time. Every customer interaction, every marketing campaign, every referral adds value to it. You are not just building a product or a service — you are building something people will remember and return to. Before you launch, before you print the business cards, before you build the website — ask yourself: what feeling do I want this name to trigger? What does it say about who I serve and how I serve them? Will my ideal customer be able to say it, remember it, and pass it on to someone else? These questions are not trivial. They are strategic. And getting them right, especially early, saves you from an expensive rebrand down the road. Lessons from Arrey The chicken eventually went back home. Our neighbour secured the fence and Arrey — as my kids still call it — is no longer a resident of our compound. But the lessons? Those stayed. My children, without any knowledge of branding or marketing, demonstrated something that the world’s most successful companies have invested millions to achieve. They took something ordinary — a wandering chicken — and gave it an identity. They made it memorable. They created attachment. They built a story around a name. And that name made all the difference in how they related to it, talked about it, and remembered it. As you think about your business, your product, your service — think about this: does it have a name that works as hard as you do? Does it give your customers something to hold? Does it make it easy for them to remember you, return to you, and refer you? Names map things to memory. Names trigger emotion. Names give identity to the ordinary and turn the ordinary into something people care about. My kids taught me that. Arrey taught me that. Now — what have you named yours? The best is yours! Yes, and finally, if you found this valuable and want to explore more on branding, positioning, and strategic growth, you can find my books online by searching for Bernard Kelvin Clive. And if you’d like to engage me for speaking, coaching, or training, reach out through my official channels. The best is yours.

Inside a recent episode

Visibility Without Value Is Vanity

Published 26 Jul 2026 · Transcript excerpt

[…] Very solid proposal. I was wowed by it. Then look at what is involved in all of that. And I said, oh, that's great. Having to help people get visibility. Then that set me thinking that In the level of growth of a startup, of a personal brand or business, visibility is very important, that you need to be visible, and not just visible, but visible to the right audience and the right markets. That is important. So as much as that proposal was promising visibility, which is large and big, which can help to become an influencer or ride on all of that, I told the team and other authors that we all need visibility because it's important, but it should be aligned to the right audience and markets. […]

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