The power is shifting, and the industry hasn’t fully caught up. What comes next requires a different foundation.

Most athlete and artist branding still begins with visibility: followers, highlights, streams, press, and surface-level aesthetics. Visibility matters, but it isn’t the core problem. It’s a prerequisite. Without alignment and authorship at source, it doesn’t compound the way traditional brands do.

The real issue is misalignment. Talent brands rarely undergo the foundational work required to align internal values, beliefs, and lived identity into a clearly authored brand point of view and positioning. Identity exists, but it is not systematically examined, defined, or translated into strategy.

Unlike product, service, or institutional brands, where positioning is explicitly authored, tested, and consistently applied, most talent brands have never been given the same level of strategic definition. As a result, their brands are expressed, but not clearly positioned.

Without a single authored point of view and positioning, owned by the talent and made accessible through cohesive guidelines and playbooks to everyone executing, strategy collapses into tactics. Positioning shifts by deal, by platform, by season. Cohesion erodes. Dilution becomes inevitable.

This isn’t a failure of talent or their partners.

It’s the outcome of a fragmented industry. Agents work with brands. Agencies layer onto agencies. Downstream channel teams change. Contracts move. Timelines compress. Turnover accelerates. Fewer people carry the work of many in increasingly strained environments. The system is optimized for transactions, not long-term brand stewardship, leaving talent to absorb the cost through inconsistency, lost leverage, and diluted equity.

At the top and increasingly across the middle, athletes and artists are more powerful than ever. They command audiences, drive sponsorship value, and shape culture, commerce, and community directly, often with more influence than the institutions around them. Yet most still operate within infrastructures never designed for this level of authority or scale.

Without clear authorship, authority, and ownership defined upfront and translated from identity-source to market with strategic rigor, visibility does not endure or compound.

Because true brand power isn’t visibility. It’s the ability to authentically author what visibility builds over time.

— Kristen Branch
Founder, Rowte + Rowte Brands