Brand
Consultancy
Consultancy
We all know that a well-defined Brand Strategy acts as a foundational blueprint for building a strong brand. It can articulate the brand’s purpose, help understand its audiences, and pinpoint the unique value it provides them. It is an essential ingredient in a new brand's beginnings as well as an established brand's revitalization.
But is it enough to answer every question a brand faces? Not quite.
As a creator of brand systems, I have worked with many clients and practitioners who have encountered important design decisions that brand strategy cannot fully inform.
Brand Strategy is essential for guiding brands forward with confidence. It is often referred to as a company’s North Star, a compass, or a map—all indicators of direction. Strategy is essential for determining where a brand should go.
But it doesn’t articulate how it should get there. Will the brand rush in headfirst, or will each step be carefully planned? Will it work alone or collaborate with others? Is the brand focused on the problems at hand, or does it look toward a horizon bigger than itself?
For many companies, the where is very similar. It’s the how that is different for everyone—and cracking that code is essential for making a brand that truly stands apart.
Experts have long struggled to understand this aspect of authenticity in branding, whether it’s referred to as Brand Personality or, more recently (and casually), Brand Vibe. Whatever one chooses to call it, Brian Lischer’s definition seems the most universally accepted: “the way a brand is personified; the sum of its emotional, psychological and behavioral patterns that remain unique over the course of its lifespan.”
At The Indelible, we believe this aspect of a brand should be broader than personality alone, also taking the brand’s values into account. We define it as Brand Character.
Where Brand Strategy looks outward, Brand Character looks inward.
Brand Strategy articulates a brand's purpose in the world, what matters to its audiences, and the value it brings. But Brand Character defines how it thinks, acts, and engages with others. Think of them as two sides of a coin, equal halves of the whole. Each is important, and both are required.
Brand Character may be elusive, but it’s not unknowable. As a brand practitioner, I have employed many current theories to create brand systems. While some are more effective than others, each is lacking. The problem: these models seek to create a character rather than discovering the uniqueness of a brand’s authentic character.
Our framework considers three primary dimensions of brand character to help us better understand:
How a brand thinks
How a brand behaves
How a brand interacts with others
Our approach to defining Brand Character ultimately provides practitioners with a new lens for evaluating the elements in their toolbox (language, color, typography, sound, and others). Its outputs confidently guide how each element could amplify the essence of its Brand Strategy while embracing the brand’s individuality for true differentiation.
For those with an interest in delving deeper, parts two and three explore what informed the construction of our framework—and what elements of past thinking we felt needed updating.
Our model, like some others, is founded on psychology’s understanding of personality. The model, often referred to as the Big Five, can be very helpful in understanding the positive and negative characteristics within people. But when building brand systems, it’s important to reinforce the brand strategy with a singular focus on the positive aspects of the brand’s character, not its negative qualities.
Brand Personality sliders: common, but flawed
“Are you more Classic or Modern?” is a familiar question that uses a semantic differential scale to determine where a brand falls along a spectrum between two traits. This type of exercise can be useful, but most practitioners don’t design it effectively.
For one, the words chosen in a pairing are often biased, negatively or positively influencing the outcome. A term like “Conventional” has immediate connotations that can rarely stand a chance against one like “Creative.” What brand wouldn’t prefer to be the latter?
In some instances, the spectrum-defining words are not mutually exclusive. Take “Caring” and “Independent” as one example. Couldn’t a brand strive to be both? I have seen this problem cause unnecessary confusion in strategy sessions with clients, especially when both ideas are equally valid.
But most importantly, word pairings are constructed without a strategic approach. They often form a random list of overlapping brand attributes, which fails to consider how to test for the full range of a brand’s potential.
Jung’s archetypes: established, but limiting
Another approach centers on the set of 12 classic archetypes defined by Carl Jung. This offers a better starting point with sound strategic backing. But for the purposes of brand definition, its weakness lies in oversimplification.
Archetypes help provide order and organization, but they are very broad categorizations that don’t embrace the multidimensional aspect of personality. These labels confine brands to a simple stereotype when in reality, today’s brands and consumers are much more richly varied and blur boundaries.
Aaker’s Brand Personality framework: popular, but criticized
Jennifer Aaker’s theoretical framework of the brand personality construct applied psychology’s model “The Big Five” factors of human personality to branding. It has been the most widely used model for brand personality following its introduction in 1997.
Since then, however, it has been criticized in many areas. Subsequent research has suggested an asymmetrical relationship between the structure of brands and human personality in terms of self-congruence—the alignment between the perceived self and the actual self.
All of these previous approaches contained useful elements. But for our model, we chose to make some necessary adjustments.
In developing our framework, we drew inspiration from the Big Five but sought to reinterpret it for commercial application, with the goal of defining a brand’s personality more objectively.
Consolidation and elimination of ideas
In evaluating the Big Five dimensions, we first noticed an overlap of similar ideas that we elected to consolidate. For instance, Openness and Conscientiousness both deal with internal behavior and how we do things. Extraversion and Agreeableness both relate to our social behavior.
To avoid traits with negative connotations, we aimed to have each side pose a viable positive choice in creating a useful differential scale.
We also disregarded Neuroticism entirely for our purposes. While it’s a useful dimension for people to understand about themselves, we presumed that every company aspires to be perceived as secure and confident.
Reclassification
Second, we determined exactly what each spectrum should define, beginning with risk. Everything in life involves risk. Personality is the result of the need to mitigate risk at a comfortable level. Risk comes in many varieties, and each brand has its own unique tolerance for them.
The level of comfort an organization has with risk can help us understand internal behavior. Combining traits of Openness and Conscientiousness captures the spectrum's polarity with "Cautious" and "Adventurous," measuring a brand's comfort level with risk. Concepts of "Tradition" or "Heritage" reflect caution, while "Speed" and "Customization" lean towards greater risk.
The level of comfort with being vulnerable can be used to understand social behavior. Ideas such as “Reserved” and “Open” best capture the spectrum of how an organization engages with its audiences. Here, we can gauge concepts such as “Subtle” versus “Bold,” or “Melody” versus “Harmony.”
Adding another dimension
The dimensions of risk and vulnerability capture a lot, but not enough. Going back to our initial consolidation, I noticed the attributes “Innovative” and “Curious” were not so much behaviors as states of mind.
So we added a third spectrum to complement our internal and external actions and how we think. This dimension examines a brand’s level of comfort with ambiguity. Is the brand more comfortable with concrete ideas, facts and figures? Or does it thrive in questions, hypotheses and the unknown?
Considering these three dimensions allows for a much greater combination of possibilities than the classic 12 archetypes, even in combination. The spectrum between each pole can be as wide as the nuance of language available to describe each level. And considering all the ways a brand could convey those aspects through its visual elements, tone of voice, and every other sensory element, an infinite set of possibilities unfolds.
But the true benefit is having the ability to fine-tune brand systems for an individualized and authentic fit. Our framework helps an organization understand where its strengths inspire or align with those of its audience, helping to build a visual and verbal language that harmonizes with its brand strategy and amplifies it for greater appeal and effectiveness.
As the African proverb states: If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. The same can be said of Brand Strategy and Brand Character.
By aligning these two powerful forces, a brand can attain a confidence empowered by a clarity of direction for both where it is going and how it can get there.
Ultimately, Brand Strategy alone isn’t enough for a brand to succeed. But when combined with Brand Character, the result is truly differentiated—and the possibilities are endless.
Thom Wolfe is a branding design expert and founding partner at The Indelible with extensive brand-building experience for companies such as GE, Marvin, Kohler, Cargill, and D'Addario. His deep knowledge of branding spans all stages from strategy development, naming, and brand architecture to digital and physical experiences. His twenty years of leadership have been influential in understanding the realities of implementing brands from the highest levels of the C-suite to the ground-level practitioners, in-house and agency alike. Clients in sectors ranging from healthcare and technology to industrial and financial appreciate the external perspective that comes with that breadth. In addition to the satisfaction he receives from helping clients, his work has been recognized with notable awards from The One Show, D&AD, and GRAMMY, and has been featured in several books.
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