CEOs should take a hint from influencers

Most CEOs probably do not want to be compared to influencers, and fair enough. The word still carries a lot of baggage: staged authenticity, personal brands, motivational captions, the occasional overuse of ring lights.

But the comparison holds up better than it first appears, and the useful part of it has nothing to do with performance. It is about how influencers build a relationship with an audience.

At their best, influencers understand that people rarely trust someone because of one perfect message. Trust grows through repeated exposure to how a person thinks, chooses, reacts and explains themselves, until an audience starts to understand what that person stands for. A lot of companies still struggle with this.

Recognisability matters

Brands invest heavily in sounding distinct: their positioning, their tone of voice, their visual identity, their campaigns. Yet when their leaders appear in public, the language often turns generic. A CEO can be thoughtful, opinionated and deeply involved in the company’s direction, and still come across in public as polished, correct, hard to disagree with and just as hard to remember. That’s a missed opportunity, because recognisability doesn’t require celebrity. It just means people can start to understand how someone thinks, what they care about, what they notice, and what kind of decisions they’re willing to make. When that happens, the company itself becomes easier to understand.

The CEO is already part of the brand

Whether companies like it or not, the CEO is one of the signals people use to read a brand, not the only one and not always the most important, but a visible one. How a CEO communicates says something about the company’s judgement: what they explain, what they avoid, what they make time for, how they respond to change.

This matters more as polished content becomes easier to produce. Every company can publish a competent post about innovation, culture, customer focus or AI, and much of it will be fine. Very little of it will feel specific. Specificity is usually where trust starts, in the moment a leader explains why a hard decision was made, what changed their mind, what a customer conversation revealed, or why the company turned down something commercially tempting. Those are the moments that give people a clearer sense of the company behind the messaging.

What influencers understand

The useful lesson from influencers is that audiences don’t come back only for announcements. They come back because they recognise a way of seeing the world, which doesn’t mean CEOs need to post constantly or comment on everything. A thoughtful, consistent presence tends to be far more valuable than a noisy one, whether that’s a written note, a podcast, a conversation on stage, or a considered reflection after a product decision. What matters is continuity rather than format.

Many CEOs only become visible when there’s news: a launch, a funding round, an acquisition, a crisis, a new market. Those moments matter, but they update people rather than help them understand. The real opportunity sits in the quieter moments, when there’s space to explain how the company actually thinks.

The trap of performative authenticity

There’s a risk here too. A CEO trying too hard to seem relatable quickly becomes uncomfortable to watch, and audiences can usually spot over-produced authenticity. The fix isn’t turning leadership into performance, but making communication feel a little less detached from the person behind it: simpler language, a clearer opinion, the trade-offs behind a decision rather than just the outcome, something that sounds less like a statement and more like someone who was actually in the room. The goal is to make the company’s judgement more visible, not to manufacture a personality.

Why this matters

A visible CEO helps employees understand direction, helps customers understand priorities, helps future hires understand culture beyond the careers page, and helps investors understand the thinking behind strategy. That doesn’t mean the CEO should become the brand; a company needs to stand for more than one person, and that can turn unhealthy quickly. But an invisible or unreadable leader leaves the company working harder to feel real.

Influencers worked out early that familiarity builds trust. Companies don’t need to copy influencer culture to learn from that. They just need to recognise that people connect more easily with people than with institutions.

The real question isn’t whether CEOs should become influencers. They shouldn’t. It’s whether CEOs can help make their companies easier to understand. That’s less glamorous than becoming an influencer, but far more useful.