Tony Robbins on Being a Personality Brand

It’s an interesting and crazy thing…being a personality brand. People want to know everything about you: what your shoe size is, what you had for breakfast. You don’t have any privacy, ever. So, that’s the not-so-thrilling things, but the value of a brand is extraordinary. Once you have a brand, you have the most valuable commodity on earth.

If you have a brand that has fame attached to it, it adds another level of energy, so to speak. There are going to be people that are threatened by a brand when there’s a personality attached to it. It’s hard to be threatened by a Coke, but with a personality someone can say, “Oh my god, he change my life!”, or they can say, “Oh, he’s a piece of crap”, without ever knowing who I am. People have impressions of who they think you are, because of what they’ve made up, based on your celebrity. They’ve never met me, never talked to me, never been to an event of mine. It just comes with the territory. The other challenge with being a celebrity brand is that people want that “physical celebrity”. So, scalability becomes a challenge.

It’s a pretty amazing thing. I wake up every morning and half-a-milion people have, for the first time, opened up one of my books, audio, or video program. I’ve had 4-million people attend my live seminars. It didn’t happen just because I thought about it and hoped people would show up. I became a brand because I innovated and marketed continuously, and I still do.

If I had my choice, as a business person, I would just build a brand. I wouldn’t build a celebrity brand, because it would give me, frankly, more freedom. But for me, I never went into this for business, I got into this to change lives. I did it when I had no agent and was near bankrupt. I do it now, when I’m financially free. It fulfils me. So, in my case, I look at my “celebrity brand” and I know it opens doors. People already have an opinion about me; whether it’s negative or positive, there’s an energy to it. It allows me to touch more lives. Without it, I wouldn’t touch as many lives and that is why I love “branding”. It’s the “branding” that allows me to touch lives around the world.