Brand Personality: How To Be Authentic

Brands, there are a lot of them. Brands with personality, not so many. How do you create a brand that stands out?

There’s a phrase that I love and with which I couldn’t agree more: “Beauty attracts attention, personality makes you unforgettable.” I don’t know who said it first. We heard it from a client and it’s been stuck in our heads ever since.

It’s said that our role as designers is, among other things, to create visual identities that are different and attractive; that turn heads and cause people to pick the products they represent off of shelves crammed with shapes, colors, and endless options; visual identities that people want to follow on Instagram; that they fall in love with. But we should never limit ourselves to only creating aesthetic solutions. Content defines form. The concept comes first. If you learn to define a brand’s personality, then you will understand its sense of style instead of trying to dress it up in something it doesn’t feel comfortable wearing.

How do you define a brand’s personality?

The first thing you need to know is that the client, almost always, has the answer. They know their business and their target market better than anybody. The key is not to invent a personality, but to be able to locate the right information in the brains and hearts of the people who live and breathe the brand every day.

The workshop

All of our projects start with a workshop. It usually lasts between two or three hours and brings together two to six people who work for the brand. In this workshop, we talk about the history of the brand, its beginnings, and its products and services. We talk about the customers and get insights into the brand’s rational and emotional way of thinking. We also discuss their direct competition.

The metaphor exercise

Once we’ve got the ball rolling, we usually do an exercise that we’ve adopted from Landor. It’s a methodology known as the Brand Driver Platform. This exercise sets out to prevent customers from giving obvious and rational answers. Instead of asking them, “What characteristics do you want your brand to have?”, we ask, “If your brand was an animal, which would it be? And if it were a drink, a place, an object?”

We’ve found that, for the exercise to work well, it’s best to ask the participants to write their answers on paper and wait until the end to share them. Otherwise, there’s the risk that some people’s answers will be influenced by others’, and they won’t follow their instinct. At the end of the workshop, we will write all of the answers on a whiteboard, followed by the reason for writing them: “Why a tiger? Why an energy drink? What do they represent to you?” The results are incredibly interesting. Try it.

A way to discovering who you are, is by asking yourself who you don’t want to be

After playing with words and meanings, we move on to thinking about antonyms. I was introduced to this exercise many years ago in a clown workshop, in which my teacher told me: “We’re all a mix of what we want to be and the opposite of what we don’t want to be.” The opposite of what we don’t want to be... It sounds confusing but it’s not.

If you don’t want to be a liar, you’ll be sincere. If you know that the last thing you want is to have a boring life, then you’ll be fun. If you don’t feel comfortable dressing elegantly, then you’ll dress casually. This is how, with a combination of metaphors and antonyms, keywords associated with the brand begin to appear.

The most difficult part: summarizing and choosing

All of these words–usually you’ll end up with quite a lot–help us to continue working. We dismiss the words that mean the same thing and those that don’t leave enough of an impression to help us create visual concepts. After a few hours, we will have cut down our list to six or nine words that will help us create a unique brand.

Being elegant is not the same as being elegant and fun. Being direct and persuasive isn’t the same as being direct, persuasive, but also kind. It is from these nuances, these unusual combinations, that the most authentic brands are born, those that manage to win our sympathy.

Words that are banned: leader and quality

We avoid these words, at all costs. They are common, easy, and we have the habit of repeating them. Being a leader isn’t an adjective, it’s a consequence. And quality doesn’t mean the same for everybody. It’s important to make the effort to understand what we really want to say.

The most attractive brands are authentic and sincere

Defining the personality of a brand helps us to generate discussion. If we get to know the brand inside out, as if it were our best friend, we’ll be able to predict and know what they would say, what they would do, and how’d they’d react in every situation.

It almost sounds like a drama exercise. And it kind of is. You need to create a brand as if it were a character. Get to know its history inside out, its way of thinking, its motivations, what it likes, and what riles it up. You have to become obsessed, you have to know everything there is to know.

Article by Daniela Nicholson (@daniela_nicholson), founder and creative director of Sed Estudio—a branding consultancy specialized in finding what makes brands relevant and stand out–as well as a teacher and mentor.

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