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TL;DR
INPUT Global released Voice, a personal branding framework with a published formula. The Voice Index scores founders 0–100 by multiplying logarithmic median reach by a quality multiplier (0.85–1.10) built from five weighted signals. It excludes followers and averages by design. The model has real seams: the January and July versions are structurally incompatible, the agency scores what it sells, and paid placements count toward quality. But publishing the arithmetic at all is unusual for the genre.
Every few months another agency pitches me a personal-branding framework, and the pitches tend to land in the same place, with stages, arrows, and a trademark symbol above advice that circulated a decade ago. Publish more often, get quoted somewhere respectable, trust the algorithm; the genre rarely rewards close reading.
INPUT Global, a communications agency focusing on emerging tech brands, released an expanded version of one such framework in late July, dubbed Voice. It sorts personal brand growth into six stages and, unusually, ends in a number: the Voice Index, a 0–100 score for how far a founder’s words actually travel. The release is unusual in one narrow respect, in that the agency published the arithmetic behind that score. Framework authors rarely expose a formula to readers inclined to check it, which earned this one a few days of my time.
Frameworks that came before this one
Agencies have circled this problem for years.
Golin’s CEO Impact Index, launched in 2024 and updated twice a year since, scores Fortune 250 chief executives on eight visibility criteria; its top fifty averaged 80% higher annual share-price growth than comparable Fortune 250 peers.
Academic work has moved more cautiously, and a 2025 Administrative Sciences paper argued that personal branding still lacks a standardised way to measure brand equity. Both stopped at the boardroom door, leaving founders one tier below outside the sample, which happens to be where most reputation spending occurs.
Voice was introduced in January this year and expanded on the agency’s site in July, dividing personal brand growth into six stages: Origin, Foundational Posting, Distribution, Author’s Format, Authority and Signature Show. INPUT Global’s co-founder Oleg Bevz described the underlying complaint in a March interview, arguing that most founders navigate on likes, conference compliments and instinct.
Inside the arithmetic
Bolted to this ladder sits the Voice Index, which resolves everything into a single figure between 0 and 100, multiplying Reach by Quality. Reach runs on a logarithmic curve calibrated per platform, anchored on whichever channel a founder sounds loudest on, with every additional platform contributing a fifth of its own weight. Each tenfold gain buys a comparable step upward, so 12,500 median views on X score 40 points and 100 arrives only at 350,000.
Two design choices give the model teeth, the first being that median reach replaces averages, since one viral post reports luck more than audience. The agency cites research finding a median of 35 views against a mean of 2,335 on X, with the top 1% of posts absorbing three-quarters of all impressions. Followers are excluded outright as purchasable and uninformative about who sees a post.
Quality then adjusts the result within a band of roughly 0.85 to 1.10, assembled from five weighted signals like Presence at 15%, Distribution at 25%, Resonance at 20%, Authority at 25%, and Signature Show at 15%. Narrowness there is deliberate, since effort can tune loudness without manufacturing it, and the published worked example moves a mid-scale founder only three points when two signals climb from average to strong.
Seams in the model
Three things gave me pause, beginning with the discovery that the July Index differs structurally from the version described in January. That earlier model used five differently weighted components on a 0–1 scale, leaving figures from the two systems impossible to compare.
Questions about who marks the work follow closely, given that INPUT Global designs the Index, computes the score, sells the service meant to raise it, and reports the improvement. No outside party verifies any step. Distribution carries a quarter of the Quality weighting with paid placements counted, which sits awkwardly against the claim that a strong score cannot be bought.
Industry appetite for measurable claims
Andrey Trubetskoy, chief executive and co-founder of the Dubai agency JETA, locates the framework’s value where I do, in measurability. Nearly two decades of work for clients like Dubai Multi Commodities Centre and Visa have shaped his view of what personal branding has lacked, and he reads methods like Voice as pulling agency practice toward data-led standards clients will eventually demand as routine.
Such caveats do not sink the exercise, since a composite score that forces a founder to name their bottleneck beats a feeling, and publishing the bands alongside a documented before-and-after makes disagreement possible. Whether the figure earns wider trust turns on something the agency cannot supply alone, namely somebody outside running the same numbers and arriving in the same place.
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