The Originality Advantage

Stop Creating Content. Start Creating Intellectual Property.

I have a radical marketing strategy for you. You could stop creating so much damn content.

I know. Somewhere, a social media strategist just dropped her ring light.

But before you panic about disappearing from the algorithm forever, consider this: when was the last time you read something online and could remember who wrote it five minutes later?

Exactly. We’re producing more content than any reasonable human could possibly consume. Posts. Reels. Carousels. Newsletters. Podcasts. Articles. And now AI can cheerfully create 30 days of it while you make a cup of tea. Which sounds wonderfully efficient until you realise everyone else has access to the same technology.

The result? An extraordinary amount of perfectly competent content that looks and sounds suspiciously like all the other perfectly competent content. And I’m not convinced the answer is to create more of it.

Because we are flooded with AI-generated content, building authority online will depend less on how much you publish and more on whether you have something original to say. An idea. A phrase. A framework. A perspective that makes someone stop scrolling and think, Oh. I hadn’t thought about it like that. Better still? They remember who said it.

But – it also means you need to have the guts to show up authentically. Come as you are.

Authority Building: We’ve Confused Posting With Positioning

In the last few years the personal branding and social media marketing playbook has been fairly predictable. Show up consistently. Educate your audience. Add value. Stay visible. Thou shalt post on LinkedIn. Thou shalt make Reels. Thou shalt feed the algorithm. Preferably while pointing at floating text.

And yes, visibility matters. Being brilliant in complete obscurity isn’t an especially effective marketing strategy. But visibility and authority are not the same thing.

You can publish five times a week and still not be known for anything in particular. You can build thousands of followers without people being able to explain what you actually stand for. You can create genuinely useful content that gets a lovely sprinkling of likes, three fire emojis and a “So needed this today!” – and is forgotten before dinner.

Authority starts when people associate your name with an idea. It grows when someone says, “Have you heard her take on this?” When a client repeats one of your phrases in a meeting. When you’re invited onto a podcast because the host wants you to talk about that thing you’re known for. That’s when you’ve moved beyond feeding the content machine. You’re building intellectual property.

Turn Your Best Content Into Intellectual Property

Here’s one of the stranger things we do in modern marketing. We spend years developing expertise and then give our best thinking approximately 36 hours on Instagram before deciding everybody has seen it and we need something new. They haven’t. Half your audience was making dinner.

Another chunk never saw it because the algorithm decided they’d rather watch a Labrador stealing a sandwich. Yet there you are on Tuesday morning staring at a blank screen thinking, What else have I got?

Maybe you don’t need something else. Maybe you need to go deeper.

That framework you’ve been using with clients for years? Name it. The phrase you keep saying in workshops that makes everyone reach for their notebook? Pay attention to it. Have you created a process because the conventional way never worked particularly well? There could be something valuable hiding there.

Intellectual property doesn’t have to begin with lawyers, trademarks and a ™ slapped onto every second noun. It starts with recognising that the way you think has value. Then doing something with it. Write an article about it. Talk about the idea on a podcast. Test it with clients. Develop the framework. Challenge it. Take it onto a stage. Let other people question it.

Come back to it six months later when your thinking has evolved. Maybe, eventually, it will become a book. That isn’t lazily recycling content. It’s building a body of work.

Women Don’t Need More Content. We Need to Claim Our Thinking.

There’s another layer to this conversation for women building personal brands and positioning themselves as thought leaders. Many women have become experts by being exceptionally good at what they do. They’ve spent years gathering experience, solving problems, leading teams, building businesses, advising clients and figuring things out the hard way.

And this is where I think a lot of us get stuck. We don’t always recognise that as something worth owning.

We’ll happily explain it to a client or share it in a workshop, but putting a name to it can feel a bit much. Who am I to call this my methodology? Surely someone else has thought of this before?

Probably. Very few ideas are completely new. But nobody else has arrived at it in quite the same way you have.

So if there’s something you keep coming back to in your work, pay attention to it. If there’s a process you use because you know it works, name it. If you keep seeing something in your industry that doesn’t make sense to you, say so.

You don’t need to invent something groundbreaking or make yourself sound more important than you are. You just need to stop dismissing the thinking you’ve spent years developing as something everybody already knows. Chances are, they don’t.

Why Original Thinking Matters Even More in the Age of AI

AI has changed things, obviously. I can ask it for 10 leadership tips, seven ways to build a personal brand and a month of LinkedIn posts before I’ve finished my coffee. And that can be useful – and tempting to rely on it. I use AI. I’m not about to pretend we should all throw our laptops into the sea and go back to writing everything longhand.

But it does mean there is an awful lot of information out there. And a lot of it is starting to sound remarkably similar. So simply knowing stuff isn’t enough anymore.

I can Google something I don’t know. I can ask AI to explain it, summarise it or give me 20 ideas about it. What I can’t get from either of those things is your 15 years of actually doing the work. I want to know what you’ve noticed. What surprised you. What you tried that absolutely didn’t work. What everyone in your industry keeps repeating that you privately – or not so privately – think is rubbish. That’s far more interesting.

And no, being original doesn’t mean you have to invent something nobody in the history of humanity has ever thought of before. That’s a fairly exhausting standard. It would also give us even more people renaming perfectly ordinary concepts and adding ™ to them.

Sometimes the value is in spotting something other people have missed. Or making a connection that seems obvious only after somebody points it out. Sometimes it’s finding the words for something people already feel but haven’t been able to articulate.

You know that feeling when you read something and think, YES. That. That’s exactly what I’ve been trying to say. You remember the person who said it. That matters.

Build a Personal Brand Around What You Want to Be Known For

There’s something slightly ridiculous about trying to become a thought leader while spending half your time checking what everybody else is thinking.

We watch competitors. Save posts. Study hooks. Check what’s trending. Wonder whether we should be doing more video because apparently we should all be doing more video.

Keeping an eye on your market makes sense. Letting it dictate everything you say doesn’t. At some point you have to stop looking sideways and decide what you see. What do you keep noticing in your work? What do you find yourself saying to clients again and again? What’s happening in your industry that makes you think, Surely I’m not the only person who thinks this makes no sense?

That’s usually more useful than asking, What should I post today? The better question is: What do I want to be known for?

And once you know, stay with it.

We get bored with our own ideas incredibly quickly. We’ve written about it twice, mentioned it on a podcast and talked about it at an event, so naturally we assume the entire world has heard it. They haven’t. Most people were doing something else.

If an idea matters to your work, keep developing it. Come back to it. Tell different stories around it. Test it. Change your mind about parts of it. Let it get better as you get better.

You don’t need to manufacture a brand-new thought every time you open LinkedIn. You need a few good ones that are actually yours. Because the interesting part isn’t how many people saw your post. It’s what happens when someone remembers your idea, repeats it to somebody else and your name comes up in a room you weren’t even in.

No algorithm can manufacture that for you. That’s when you’ve built something bigger than content.