The Brand Personality Paradox

For most of my career as a brand strategist, I’ve treated brand personality as a prerequisite. A tidy list of three to five traits, locked in early, then handed off as guardrails for creative development. It’s clean. It’s logical. And it’s also starting to feel fundamentally backwards. The more brands I help build, the clearer it becomes: the most compelling personalities don’t emerge from workshops or word lists—they emerge from the work itself.

Is personality a prerequisite or product of creation?

Strategy and creative development are the one-two punch of brand-building. We first set the strategy, and then that strategy comes to life through creative execution. At the core of brand strategy is the positioning: a deliberate way forward for the brand that identifies the audience it wants to convince and how the brand meaningfully differentiates itself from alternatives. Positioning involves additional nuances, but the key point for our discussion is there are a myriad ways that a positioning strategy can be creatively expressed. That’s what makes a creative’s job both challenging and rewarding—they must explore vast possibilities and land on a unique and interesting solution.

But here’s where conventional process breaks down: before any of that unbridled creative exploration can take place, the strategist arrives on scene with predetermined personality traits that instantly constrain ideation. And these traits come with inherent flaws.

Flaw No. 1: How traits come to be defined
Typically, I’m guiding a group of company executives through exercises to determine what their brand should be. Does our brand lean more corporate or more casual? More emotional or more technical? You get the idea. Regardless of which exercise I use, we’re making these highly considered, analytical decisions about how the brand should look and feel. And despite my attempts to push executives to think ahead about what the brand should become, there’s still a certain amount of anchoring to what the brand currently is today, to what is familiar and safe. In sum, maybe there is too much client influence here.

Flaw No. 2: The brand personality format
The list of traits. While they can be helpful, their effectiveness is undermined by a natural subjectivity in traits such as “bold”, “approachable”, or “sophisticated”. You say, “well, you should identify more distinctive traits than those generic attributes.” Fair point, but it’s only a partial solution in my mind. I’ll propose an alternative to traits and attributes in a bit.

What results from this flawed process is a list of attributes that somewhat constrain the creative team, yet create more noise than clarity. Creatives must now spend time and energy figuring out how they can reverse-engineer Nimble, for example, into their brand system, instead of imagining what shape and form this brand could truly own.

An alternative to premature personalities

Now, some creatives appreciate the limitations provided by an executive team-blessed personality. I get it. Guardrails can help with focus. It’s a fair argument. But if we’re going to take the traits route, they should only be a starting point for a possible personality, not the final conclusion. In other words, I’m not fully anti-traits, especially if they serve a meaningful role in how your team develops brands. Let’s just rethink their long-term importance.

So, here’s my solution and how it works in practice:

1. Brand personality is no longer an upfront strategy deliverable. We allow the creative team to do what they do best. Visual thinking in ways only creatives can.
2. Abstract personality traits give way to specific brand behaviors. These are specific actions, decisions or POVs that the brand universally follows. For example: “Our brand leads with solutions, not problems”.
   For more examples, see Figure 1 below. 
3. Brand personality is finalized by the strategist, in collaboration with the creative team, at the conclusion of brand development. Just like defining the clear space rules for the brand’s logo or selecting final PMS swatches for the color palette, the brand’s behaviors are codified. It’s a collaborative exercise because the strategist must extract and systematize the decisions that were made—purposefully or unconsciously—by the creative team as they developed the brand.

Ideally then, in the future, whoever seeks instruction from the brand guide will not be presented with “Bold, Approachable, Sophisticated” but a clear set of brand behaviors to steer their creative-decisioning making.

Let the conversation begin

Will clients push back on this alternative to brand personality? Possibly. However, it’s worth making the argument that brand personality is intended to consistently underscore a brand’s positioning. What’s a more effective way to do that: referencing a subjective list of traits or a concrete set of behaviors?

This proposed switch from convention is a working theory to spark conversation. I don’t have case studies to back it up (yet). Admittedly, there are likely other approaches to personality that I simply don’t know about. I’d love to hear about those or any feedback you’d like to share. Takes from both strategists and creatives are welcome.

Figure 1:
Brand Behaviors 

Imagine you’re charged with brand implementation, armed with a reasonably comprehensive brand guide. As part of that guide, would you rather have a set of brand traits (Bold, Approachable, Sophisticated) or a short-list of brand behaviors (5-7) to help you make decisions?

10 unrelated brand behavior examples: