Personal Branding of Managers: A Strategy for Strengthening Islamic Governance and Public Trust

In the complex and dynamic environment of contemporary governance, the legitimacy, influence, and effectiveness of managers are more than ever dependent on their symbolic and image capital in society. Within the framework of Islamic governance—whose foundations, aims, and methods are defined on the basis of justice, value-orientation, meritocracy, and accountability—“public trust” is regarded as a vital asset. Nevertheless, experiences over recent decades indicate that public trust, even in societies grounded in religious values, can be impaired by weak communications, inefficiency, or a negative image of managers. One of the novel approaches to strengthening public trust is managers’ “personal branding,” a process through which a manager, by accurately understanding his or her personality, values, skills, and performance and aligning them with governance missions, creates a credible, appealing, and enduring image in the minds of stakeholders. In today’s competitive, media-driven space, where public opinion is daily confronted—via social networks, mass media, and face-to-face communications—with a flood of data and messages, the absence of deliberate personal branding causes the image of strategic managers to form passively and at times in a distorted manner, thereby harming public trust. The present research aims to explain the role and function of strategic managers’ personal branding in strengthening Islamic governance and rebuilding public trust. This study seeks to answer the fundamental question of how the capacities of personal branding can be used—not merely as an individual marketing technique, but as a strategic, value-oriented instrument—to enhance the social capital of an Islamic government. Embedded within this principal aim are multiple subsidiary objectives: identifying the constituent components of a personal brand consistent with Islamic values; explaining the mechanisms through which these components affect public trust; and presenting a model that forges a linkage between the manager’s personal identity, the pattern of Islamic governance, and the indicators of public trust. The perspective of this research is that personal branding, if formed on the basis of honesty, keeping promises, justice-seeking, and effectiveness, not




302                                                                    Islamic Governance Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2, 2025




only does not conflict with Islamic teachings but can become a legitimate and effective instrument for promoting the model of a manager aligned with the ideals of the Islamic Revolution. Methodologically, the present study is applied in type with a qualitative approach. Data were collected through documentary and field methods. In the documentary part, sources including books, domestic and international scholarly articles, upstream documents related to Islamic governance, religious teachings, and studies in the field
of personal branding were examined and analyzed. In the field part, semi-structured interviews were conducted with a purposive sample of experts, including university professors, researchers in the field of governance, experienced high-level managers, and media practitioners, in order to extract the dimensions and localized requirements of managers’ personal branding in the context of Islamic Iran. The collected data were coded, categorized, and interpreted using Theme Analysis. Moreover, to ensure the validity of the findings, strategies of participant review and comparison with authoritative texts were employed. The findings indicate that personal branding in Islamic governance has four fundamental dimensions: the personality and ethical dimension, grounded in honesty, commitment, humility, courage, justice-seeking, and service to the people; the skill and professional dimension, which addresses the manager’s scholarly, managerial, and strategic competencies and constitutes a necessary condition for establishing professional credibility; the communicative and interactive dimension, which includes the ability to communicate effectively with the public, active listening, transparency in information dissemination, accountability, and persuading the audience; and the symbolic and cultural dimension, which refers to the manager’s role as a model and cultural reference in Islamic society and is conveyed through his or her conduct, speech, and lifestyle. The synergy of these dimensions forms a personal brand that is not an artificial, promotional image, but rather an objective reflection of the manager’s real character and performance in the public mind. The research also showed that the linkage between personal branding and public trust
is established through multiple pathways. First, alignment of words and deeds: when managers match their promises and statements with real actions, the credibility of their personal brand is enhanced in public opinion. Second, transparency and accountability: honest and prompt information about decisions and actions, even under crisis conditions, signals respect for the people and creates a sense of participation in governance. Third, reliability and predictability: consistency in positions and behaviors increases trust in the continuity of policies. Fourth, inspiration and moral authority: managers whose lifestyle and conduct reflect Islamic exemplars increase the capital of public trust not only in the technical sphere but also in cultural and identity-related dimensions. From a policy perspective, the findings indicate that achieving effective personal branding in Islamic governance requires systematic measures, including training and empowering managers in communication and media skills; creating consultative bodies to align messages with values; designing mechanisms for continuous evaluation of managers’ public image and for gathering feedback from society; and preventing the emergence of a gap between image and reality through institutional transparency. These measures must be considered within a framework that preserves and strengthens the managers’ religious-revolutionary identity and prevents personal branding from turning into a tool for self-promotion or destructive competition. In sum, the present research emphasizes that personal branding in the context of Islamic governance—if built upon honesty, justice, expertise, and effective interaction—can become a strategic instrument for enhancing public trust and consolidating the bond between the people and the state. This approach transforms managers from being passive before public judgment into active agents in managing their image, and, by aligning personal identity with organizational mission, it facilitates the realization of the model of a manager befitting the Islamic Revolution.