Brands Need To Have Personality
Personality is the combination of characteristics and qualities that form the brand’s distinctive character.
Some brands have got it nailed. Others drift in a world of beige and vanilla, between a state of not knowing and confusion about what they stand for.
When I encounter a piece of adrenaline sport content, Red Bull immediately comes to mind. Or if it’s a piece of science and innovation content, I think of General Electric.
Instead of advertising through commercials and billboards, these guys are using content to engage with their audience.
“Every brand has to find out what their audience wants to see and how they like to engage. When you can show a customer who you are with an enjoyable experience, your content becomes more than just marketing,” said GE’s chief creative officer Andy Goldberg in an interview with Adweek.
Lots of brands dream of becoming a Red Bull or a GE. The harsh and honest truth is, not all brands can achieve the holy grail of content marketing. Red Bull had a head start and was experimenting with content marketing long before there was such a thing as content marketing. GE has an inspirational Chief Marketing Officer who demands innovation from her marketing team. Both organisations have an internal structure built to support this style of marketing. With support from senior management comes bigger budgets. Not all organisations are made equal. The majority of brands will have to make do with smaller budgets. But from tight budgets, exciting campaigns can still be born.
Big budget or limited budget, the fundamental difference is that the best content marketing brands know how to tell stories. The marketing team understands the power of emotional storytelling — and knows how to call in the right experts to handle the storytelling aspect during content production.
Good storytelling affects the human mind. Jonathan Gottschall, author of The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, wrote:
“Fiction does mould our minds. Story — whether delivered through films, books or video games — teaches us facts about the world; influences our moral logic; and marks us with fears, hopes, and anxieties that alter our behaviour, perhaps even our personalities. Research shows that story is constantly nibbling and kneading us, shaping our minds without our knowledge or consent. The more deeply we are cast under story’s spell, the more potent its influence.”
Every great story has a narrative. You need to know who you’re talking to and the message you want to share with this audience. It is only in understanding your brand inside out, what it stands for, its identity and values, that we can start coming up a narrative.
Stories are multi-layered and are built to carry implicit and explicit messages. As Ira Glass explains about the building blocks of storytelling, a story is weak unless there is a clear point to it.
Everything a brand does says something about it. The things that you choose to say, how you say it and even the circle of influencers you keep in your company are very revealing. It expresses the values and characteristics of that brand.
GE has podcasts (Pivot and The Message), a documentary series about science and tech entitled Breakthrough with Brian Grazer and Ron Howard, a magazine GE Reports, a series of short films called Unimpossible Missions, a Tumblr, and the staple social channels. All of its content ladders up to one overarching message which is that GE is about science and innovation. They know who they are and use a variety of ways to eschew that message.
The thing about content marketing is that we are creating content to entertain and to engage with the audience. Because of the huge amount of content available at the tip our finger, we are constantly distracted. You need to keep improving on what you create. Take the learnings from one campaign and feed it into the next. Ad infinitum. If you don’t put it out there, then you’ll never know what resonates with your audience.
But you need to go back to basics to your brand identity. It is only from knowing who are you, then are you able to have a personality.
Tune in next week where I will be writing about how brands can get themselves a personality.
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