Crafting a Brand with Character
If I took a shot every time someone at a conference said, “Your brand is a story,” I’d be dead.
And look, I’ve said it before too. Cut me some slack—sometimes I just want to watch an influencer play craps on YouTube instead of interrogating every marketing cliché.
While the idea of brand as a story sounds nice, the more you interrogate it the less sense it makes.
A story has a beginning, middle, and end with stakes and obstacles. That’s not what you think of when you think of legendary brands. What is Nike’s rising action, climax and resolution? How does Apple represent a journey into the abyss where a price is paid?
Brands can tell stories and they can be part of stories. It’s every marketer’s dream that their brand has compelling customer stories or finds a place within broader cultural reflections.
Brands can also have backstories for how they came to be. And those stories help shape how those brands walk and talk.
But the brand itself is not the story.
The brand is a character.
And no, this isn’t me being subversive to appease my own ego. That’s something I’m known to do. I’m working on it.
The problem with thinking of a brand as a story is you are far more likely to commit the cardinal sin of making everything about you when nobody really gives a shit.
You also end up overlooking or under-thinking some of the most important parts of the branding process.
Defining the brand as a character: less rules, more personality.
A brand goes wrong when it’s all rules and no personality. The best brands don’t just follow guidelines—they embody a character.
Branding as a set of rules often leads to rigid, lifeless communication that lacks flexibility across different contexts.
This also tends to piss off creatives who feel handcuffed when trying to make good work happen after inheriting brand guidelines.
Take social media as a channel. Brands obsessed with rules show up as a collection of cringey corporate templates.
On the flipside, brands without personality just mindlessly sway in the winds of memes and Tiktok trends without having a distinctive voice, or really any reason to be there at all. Very mindful. Very demure.
The real test on whether you’ve achieved an effective brand is if your entire team can easily agree on what’s in character and what’s out of character beyond “is that enough clear space around the logo…and can you make it bigger while you’re in there?”
Consider making your brand guidelines look a lot more like how a Hollywood writer or a novelist might keep track of the characters in their stories. Talk about it in a plain spoken way, avoid hollow words like “authentic” or “inspiring”. Try to get to something sticky, tangible and unique — like any great character from any great story you've enjoyed.
The exception to the rule about rules: distinctive brand assets
While a brand’s personality should be fluid and expressive, some elements must remain consistent to aid in recognition and recall.
People won’t remember much of the copy you drop in an ad, but they will recognize a small handful of visual, sonic, and verbal cues. Those will serve as important mental shortcuts to connect the dots between how you made them feel and the brand itself. This helps you avoid the classic “Haha, that ad was funny! Ad for what? Oh, I forget.”
But the brand as a character metaphor works well for this process too:
Harry Potter: round glasses, lightning scar, messy hair.
Mickey Mouse: big round ears, red shorts, creepy gloves.
McDonald’s: golden arches, red and yellow, "buh duh bum bum bum."
Instead of creating 40 pages of rules, identify the 3-5 most critical distinctive brand assets you will rally behind and focus on those.
Usually the logo is one of those, of course. Beyond that, instead of checking a bunch of boxes down a pre-canned list of actions, put more thought and craft into a few key splashy elements that can stand out in the space you operate:
A bold color.
A distinctive sound.
A funky mascot.
A repeated motion.
A novel art style.
And yes, potentially a tagline. Though frankly I find taglines to be among the least likely assets to achieve any sort of salience. Take em or leave em depending on what feels right. Not every character in every story has a catch phrase— in fact, it’s often lame when they do.
And one last thing: if you are leading a rebrand process with an existing brand, make sure to identify if you have any distinctive assets already that need to be carried forward.
I’ve been pushed into minimizing a brand’s best asset because the client team talked themselves out of it for no good reason. Sadly I didn’t fight for it like I should have.
The other big test for whether you have genuinely succeeded in defining your brand is if the entire team can unequivocally ID what these distinctive brand assets are, or should be.
How BRINK builds brands
I put together a one-page cheat sheet called "Anatomy of a Brand."
It outlines our most recent process for how we advise brand’s come to life, keeping the character as a metaphor top of mind.
Just don’t get too caught up in frameworks, as the business world is prone to do.
Remember your brand is not a set of rigid rules. It’s a character you get to breathe life into.
Don’t build a rulebook. Build a presence. Make your brand so distinct, so unmistakable, that it finds a place in other people’s stories.
Playing it safe is a guaranteed way to be forgotten. Make a statement instead—check out THE ADVANTAGE OF A GREAT BRAND to see why.