Will Jones
Photo by Kristina Pavlenko
The international strategic advisor and entrepreneur has spent her career studying how people decide what — and whom — to trust. Now she believes identity is becoming a business asset in its own right.
For years, identity was largely treated as a branding question — something expressed through logos, messaging, image and communication. Elizaveta Sizyh thinks that definition is becoming too narrow.
As artificial intelligence makes it easier to create content, products and even entire businesses, Sizyh is interested in what becomes harder to manufacture: recognition, credibility and trust.
Her career began in journalism before moving into advertising, strategy and agency leadership, with experience at agencies including Red Keds, Pichesky and Grape. Her work during that period included projects for brands such as Google Play, Beeline, Tele2 and Tuborg. She later built and sold her own marketing agency before moving closer to strategic advisory, working with high-potential companies on positioning, growth, investor readiness and international expansion.
Sizyh has also served as a judge for The Ventures, evaluating startups across areas including positioning, go-to-market strategy, scalability and commercial potential, and for the Silver Mercury International Festival, where she evaluated the work of marketing and communications professionals.
What connects those experiences, she says, is a question she has been asking in different forms throughout her career:
Why are some people, companies and ideas easier to understand, remember and trust than others?
Today, she describes that question through a concept she calls The Identity Economy.
Sizyh was interviewed about perception, capital, AI, creators and why identity may be moving from the language of branding into the economics of business.
You’ve worked in journalism, advertising, entrepreneurship and strategic advisory. What connects all of those chapters for you?
I think I’ve been studying the same thing from different angles without realizing it.
When I was a journalist, I was interested in why one story became a headline while another disappeared. Then I moved into advertising, working at agencies including Red Keds and Pichesky, where the question became: why can some brands command attention while others have to continuously buy it?
Later, as SMM Director at Grape, I was leading work across brands including Tele2 and Tuborg. That moved me from thinking primarily about individual campaigns to thinking about how brands build recognizable identities across multiple channels and over time.
Then I built my own agency. As a founder, perception stopped being only a communications question because I could see how positioning affected clients, pricing, hiring, growth and eventually the value of the business itself.
Working internationally added another layer. The context kept changing, but the question underneath it was surprisingly consistent:
Why are some people, companies and ideas easier to understand, remember and trust than others?
That’s what eventually brought me to identity.
When you say “identity,” what exactly do you mean?
Not personal branding in the conventional sense.
I’m not particularly interested in creating an image and convincing people to believe it. That approach has a very short life.
I’m interested in the meaning people attach to a person, company or idea.
If I mention a company and you immediately associate it with innovation, safety, rebellion, luxury or reliability, that’s part of its identity. Those associations influence your behavior before anyone begins actively selling something to you.
The same happens with people.
Identity affects whether somebody remembers you, recommends you, takes your call, wants to work with you or trusts your judgment.
So for me, identity sits somewhere between what is true about you and what other people understand to be true about you.
And the distance between those two things can have real economic consequences.
“Businesses compete for perception before they compete for customers.”
What does that mean in practice?
Before somebody buys something, invests in something or even agrees to hear more about it, there’s usually a much faster decision happening: Do I understand this, and do I trust it enough to continue?
I saw this repeatedly in advertising.
At creative agency Red Keds, I became interested in how people connected emotionally with stories before they connected with products. Later, at Pichesky, working on strategy and communications involving brands such as Beeline and Google Play, I became increasingly interested in perception — particularly in the difference between what a company says and what people actually hear.
Eventually I started seeing the same mechanism in investment.
An investor can’t experience the future of a company. They have to interpret it. Of course the product, market, financial model and team matter. But somebody still has to make sense of all those facts and form a view of what the company could become.
That’s why I don’t think positioning is simply communication.
It’s part of the architecture through which an opportunity becomes understandable.
Photo by cinematxart
But a strong identity can’t make a weak company successful.
No, and that’s an important distinction.
Identity can’t sustainably compensate for reality.
You can manufacture attention for a while. You can create an impressive campaign. You can tell a beautiful story. But eventually people encounter the product, the founder, the company or the actual experience.
Reality catches up.
That’s why I don’t think the first question should be, “How do I want people to see me?”
I would start with something less comfortable: What is actually true?
What have you built? What do you consistently do? What do you believe strongly enough to make decisions around it? What value do people reliably receive from you?
Identity isn’t decoration placed on top of those things. Ideally, it’s the pattern that emerges from them.
You’ve described perception as a kind of prism. How does that work in business?
Two people can receive exactly the same information and interpret it completely differently.
We all look at the world through previous experiences, expectations, cultural assumptions and beliefs. Business doesn’t somehow exist outside that.
The same startup can appear ambitious to one investor and unrealistic to another. The same founder can be interpreted as visionary in one environment and inexperienced in another.
The underlying facts may be identical. The interpretation isn’t.
That’s why simply changing the story isn’t always enough. Sometimes you have to understand the lens through which the story is being received.
You can influence what you communicate, but you can’t completely control what it means to somebody else.
Identity exists somewhere between intention and interpretation.
“Products travel. Trust doesn’t.”
Has working internationally changed the way you think about identity?
Very much.
One of the clearest lessons came from working on an international fintech launch across twelve markets. It made me realize that localization isn’t simply about translating language. You’re also translating credibility.
Different markets have different relationships with institutions, technology, money, risk and authority. Something that signals innovation in one country can signal instability somewhere else.
A company may think its identity is fixed because its logo, product and mission haven’t changed. But the meaning attached to that identity changes depending on who is looking at it.
Technology has made it incredibly easy for products to cross borders.
Trust still has to be built locally.
One of your Beeline projects was recognized by Silver Mercury. What did that experience teach you about reputation?
The brand was dealing with criticism online, and the instinct in that situation can be to become defensive or try to make negativity disappear.
We took a different approach and built communication around acknowledging what people were actually saying and responding to it in real time. The project was later recognized as a Silver Mercury finalist.
What stayed with me wasn’t only the recognition. It was seeing that people don’t necessarily expect perfection from a company. They want to understand what it stands for and whether its behavior is consistent with what it says.
That changed my definition of reputation.
Companies sometimes treat reputation as the ability to control the conversation. I think it’s closer to what remains when you no longer control the conversation.
Photo by Katerina Si
Earlier in your career, your work received industry recognition, including Silver Mercury and Tagline. Years later, you returned to Silver Mercury as a judge. Did that change the way you looked at recognition?
Earlier in my career, work I was involved in received industry recognition, including Silver Mercury finalist recognition for the Beeline campaign and a Tagline Award for the Tuborg digital campaign.
At that stage of my career, awards felt like validation of the work. Years later, returning to Silver Mercury as a judge felt completely different.
When you’re creating something yourself, you’re emotionally inside it. You know how difficult it was to make, you know the intentions behind it, and you know all the decisions that never make it into the final presentation.
As a judge, you don’t have that luxury. You have to evaluate what’s actually in front of you.
That experience became even more interesting when I later judged startups at The Ventures Indonesia. The context was different, but I noticed that I was asking surprisingly similar questions.
At Silver Mercury, I was looking at strategy, creativity, execution, effectiveness and measurable results. At The Ventures, I was evaluating things such as positioning, go-to-market strategy, scalability, competitive advantage and commercial potential.
In both cases, the question underneath was essentially:
Can this idea survive contact with reality?
It also changed the way I think about failure.
“It didn’t work” and “it didn’t work once” are two very different statements.
One failed attempt gives you information. It doesn’t necessarily give you a conclusion. What matters is what happens next: Did you learn anything? Did that information change your next decision? Did the next version become better?
Persistence without learning is just repetition. Persistence combined with adaptation is something very different.
After building and selling your agency, you moved closer to strategic advisory. What interested you about that side of business?
I became fascinated by what happens before capital arrives.
Marketing often starts with the question: How do we make people want this?
Strategic advisory takes me one step back: What exactly are we building? Why should it matter? Where can it grow? And how does it become a credible economic opportunity?
When I advise high-potential startups and growth businesses, I’m interested in how positioning, the business model, market opportunity, growth strategy and investor narrative connect.
Judging startups reinforced something I had already started seeing in advisory work: a great idea and an investable opportunity are not necessarily the same thing.
A founder can have genuinely interesting technology and still struggle to explain why the company should exist, where the market is, how it scales or why now is the right moment.
That gap interests me.
Photo by Katerina Si
What happens when identity meets capital?
Capital obviously doesn’t invest in identity alone. Fundamentals matter.
But investment requires people to form a view of a future that doesn’t exist yet. And that introduces interpretation.
If an opportunity is difficult to understand, it’s difficult to evaluate. The same applies to founders. A founder’s reputation can’t substitute for the economics of the company, but trust in someone’s judgment, consistency and ability to execute can influence how people perceive risk.
I think that’s where identity and capital become more connected than we traditionally acknowledge.
Identity doesn’t create the underlying value.
But it can influence whether somebody gets close enough to discover that value in the first place.
Can identity actually be measured?
Not perfectly, and I would be suspicious of anyone claiming to have one number for it.
But we can measure many of its consequences.
Look at customer acquisition, conversion, retention, pricing power, inbound opportunities, partnership access, talent attraction or even the speed at which a company can open certain conversations.
We usually treat these as separate business outcomes. I’m interested in whether some of them share an underlying variable: trust.
Imagine two companies with comparable products and comparable prices. If one requires dramatically less persuasion before customers, partners or investors are willing to engage, that difference has economic value.
That’s when identity becomes more than a branding conversation.
It becomes an efficiency question.
So is reputation essentially a way of reducing friction?
In some ways, yes.
Every business interaction contains a degree of friction.
Do I trust this company? Is this founder credible? Is this product worth the risk? Should I take this meeting?
A strong reputation doesn’t eliminate those questions. It changes how much evidence someone needs before they’re willing to take the next step.
I think of trust as something that can compress the distance between attention and action.
And that distance has economic consequences.
“When production becomes cheap, trust becomes expensive.”
Why do you think AI makes identity more important?
Because AI is dramatically reducing the cost of producing things — content, design, software, research, even early business concepts.
That’s exciting. But abundance creates another problem.
If everyone can produce more, production itself becomes less useful as a signal of quality.
We then need other ways of deciding what deserves our attention and, more importantly, what deserves our trust.
For a long time, access to production was itself an advantage. Increasingly, many of the same tools are available to almost everyone.
So differentiation starts moving elsewhere: judgment, taste, credibility, relationships, reputation and a history of doing what you said you would do.
That’s why I don’t think AI makes human identity less relevant.
It may do the opposite.
AI can replicate output much faster than it can replicate reputation.
Where do you already see this “Identity Economy” taking shape?
Creators are one of the clearest examples.
Traditionally, you built a product and then spent money finding an audience for it.
Some creators have reversed that sequence. They establish an identity, build trust and develop an audience before the product exists. When they eventually launch a company, film, product or intellectual property, they may already have something businesses traditionally had to buy: distribution.
That’s why I’m interested in creator-led businesses and films. I’m less interested in follower counts than in what happens when an audience becomes economically useful infrastructure.
Historically, a studio might finance content and then spend heavily to acquire attention for it. A creator can sometimes enter the process with attention, trust and distribution already established.
The interesting question for me is: When does an audience stop being a marketing channel and start becoming business infrastructure?
That’s a very different way of thinking about identity.
Is that what you mean by “The Identity Economy”?
Yes. I’m using The Identity Economy to describe an economy in which identity, recognition, reputation and trust increasingly influence access to economic opportunity.
For much of economic history, competitive advantage was strongly connected to physical assets. Then information became enormously valuable. Now technology is making both information and production increasingly abundant.
So I’m interested in what remains scarce.
Trust is scarce. Credibility is scarce. Human attention is scarce. Being clearly understood in an environment filled with noise is scarce.
Identity connects many of those things.
That doesn’t mean perception becomes more important than reality. I would argue the opposite: the strongest identity is a clear expression of a reality that can withstand scrutiny.
But when that reality becomes recognizable, memorable and trusted, it starts influencing behavior.
That’s where identity becomes economically meaningful.
What do you think people misunderstand most about identity?
They think identity starts with deciding how they want to be perceived.
I think that’s backwards.
It should start with evidence.
What have you actually done? What decisions do you repeatedly make? What do you believe strongly enough to act on? What value do people consistently receive from you?
Over time, those things create a pattern.
When that pattern becomes clear enough, people begin to understand what you represent without requiring a long explanation every time.
That’s when identity becomes reputation.
And when that reputation begins changing behavior — who calls you, who trusts you, who buys from you, who wants to work with you or invest alongside you — identity becomes an economic asset.