What is authority and how does it relate to brand marketing?

“The thing is, we’re not getting invited to the table – our competitors are being asked to pitch for work and we’re only hearing about it afterwards.”

This was the challenge a client brought to me a few months ago. An established consultancy with 20+ years of experience and plenty of glowing testimonials but somehow they couldn’t move beyond ‘steady growth’ and into ‘breaking new ground’ territory.

The problem wasn’t one of expertise – there was no denying they knew their stuff. It was one of authority. They weren’t the first name that people came up with when looking for someone to help out with a new project.

Many experts – both individuals and brands of all kinds – find themselves in this situation. The quality is there, but it isn’t reaching the people who matter or, if it is, it isn’t recognised and valued for some reason.

This is what authority building is about and, as we’ll see, it’s a central issue for brand marketers, especially those working within knowledge based industries such as consulting and professional services.

TL:DR

• An authority is someone who is an expert on a particular subject and whose opinions influence other people
• Visibility is important but only in combination with expertise – otherwise, it’s just fame
• Expertise needs to be articulated and disseminated in order for authority to develop, and credibility and trust also need to be built
• Both authority building and brand marketing are about reputation – these can grow naturally but can also be done strategically

What does authority mean?

The word authority has several meanings but the one we’re interested in here is that of being an authority (like a scientist or professor) rather than in authority (like a military captain or a judge) – though of course, the two often coexist.

This type of authority – often referred to as epistemic authority – is a complex concept that blends social psychology, sociology and even philosophy. But for the sake of ease, let’s take the Cambridge dictionary definition: “someone who is an expert on a particular subject, and whose opinions influence other people.”

There are several elements here worth noting. Firstly, the expertise. To be an authority is to have greater knowledge or experience of a given topic than most people, even within your chosen field.

Then we have the role of other people. Because expertise without the perception or acknowledgement of other people is merely that – expertise. Authority is about being recognised and trusted as an expert. And that means that visibility is an important part of the puzzle.

Of course, just as expertise alone doesn’t amount to authority, neither does being known. You can be a household name but if there is no expertise attached to that visibility, you’re merely famous, and not an authority.

Finally, we have the concept of influence. An authority is in a unique place to influence others – to change their habits or behaviours, to choose one course of action over another. That’s why it’s important for anyone making a judgement about a given person or brand to distinguish between genuine, objective authority, and perceived or subjective authority, which is superficial and misleading.

How is authority different from expertise?

As we’ve seen, authority begins with developing expertise. I’ve been writing and speaking about expertise for many years – what it is, how to use it to build a brand, even how in-house marketers can extract it from colleagues.

One of my favourite resources on the subject is a book by surgeon and author Dr Roger Kneebone called Expert: Understanding the Path to Mastery. In it, he describes the gradual development of an apprentice who needs their work supervised, into a journeyman who can work independently, and finally into a master who pushes the boundaries of their field and begins to teach others.

He talks about the difference between expertise in terms of skill (such as carpentry) and knowledge (such as the history of the European Union), as well as interactional expertise, which he describes as the “ability to speak the language of experts whose work you cannot do.”

But once we have that foundation of expertise, how do we take the next step to become an authority? How do we bridge the gap between expertise and reputation?

Broadly speaking, I’ve identified three elements that need to be layered on top of expertise in order for authority to exist:

• Articulation: the expression of knowledge, skill or experience in a form that can be consumed by others
• Dissemination: the sharing of this articulated expertise in a way that builds visibility with the intended audience
• Credibility and trust-building: the development of additional signals that allow authority to grow and influence others

There’s a lot to be said about each of these three factors, which I’ll be diving into more deeply in a separate article very soon.

How important is authority for brand marketing?

The link between authority and brand marketing becomes clear when you reframe both as being about reputation building.

Sometimes that happens naturally. An expert ends up as an authority without deliberately making that the goal. But we can study that natural evolution and use it to become more strategic about our own activity, accelerating the process of becoming an authority. This is where we enter brand marketing territory.

A scientist publishing a research paper or speaking at an academic conference may not think of what they’re doing as brand building, but it is. They are building their own personal brand – or reputation – and that of the institution within which they work. It’s really not that far removed from the way in which a CEO within a commercial organisation might create thought leadership or speak at an industry event.

What brand marketers need to do is to go a step further and link authority to commercial results. This isn’t as straightforward as calculating the ROI of an advertising campaign, not least because there isn’t an agreed way to quantify authority. 

But there are indicators. The link between trust and business results, for example, is highly documented. This analysis of campaigns in the IPA Effectiveness Databank, which was published in early 2026, shows that “93% of for-profit advertising campaigns that report very large increases in brand trust also report at least one very large business effect, such as sizable growth in sales, market share or profit.” Since trust forms a key part of an authority’s ability to influence outcomes, we can logically hypothesise that developing authoritativeness will have equally positive business outcomes.

What role does authority have in the age of AI?

It’s worth considering one final point when it comes to authority and brand building at this particular juncture in history, and that is the role of AI. 

An obvious area for study is whether – and how much – authority, as we’re defining it here, influences AI search. Are signals such as media coverage, industry accreditations and consistency of messaging as important for shaping an LLM’s perceptions as they are for shaping a person’s? Does an increase in authority (or authority signals) automatically lead to greater visibility? 

We know that ‘authoritativeness’ is an important factor in Google search. I’ve written and spoken about the EEAT framework and how this allows Google’s Page Quality Raters to establish how useful a website or webpage is. So it’s likely that Gemini at the very least will be considering authority in deciding what gets surfaced, cited and recommended in AI summaries.

Perhaps a more interesting question though is, will AI recommendation become an authority signal in itself? As more and more search queries end with people staying inside search engines, LLMs or AI agents, will they take the place of other sources in terms of validating expert claims? Will we stop judging what’s trustworthy or credible for ourselves and take the word of a bot instead? And what can true experts and their organisations do to retain their status as authorities if that happens?

The reality, of course, is that there is no simple answer. The AEO / GEO / AI search space is complex and rapidly changing. Tactics that work today might be out of date tomorrow, much like keyword stuffing and backlinks once delivered results for SEOs but eventually became something brands were punished for.

What I tell my clients is that yes, of course we need to understand how changing technologies impact us and and decide how we can use them most beneficially. But marketing strategy is not – cannot – be built on a single channel tactic, no matter how much people are shouting about it.

Authority building is about developing a credible, trustworthy reputation based on genuine expertise, in a way that influences people’s thinking and decision-making. For expert-led businesses, that’s a long-term brand strategy that, if executed well, will deliver results for many years to come.

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