SORCERER
Introducing Struck’s extensible hyper-local persona for brands.
Social media has introduced several opportunities for people to have interactions with brands. The affinity that we feel for a brand can be directly shared with others, and we can even start a dialogue with that brand. There are still a lot of brands that haven’t exactly figured out what that dialogue is like, but on a whole, it comes down to brand persona — the combination of your brand values with a tone & voice exercise (not to mention a social media team and a response playbook).
We found that a challenge arises as social media matures and megalithic brands must begin to contend with regional sense-of-place or other demographics. What then? The brand voice probably needs to change, but there are a lot of challenges around doing potentially a lot of research and new brand/tone exercises for micro-climate audiences. That a single brand voice is inadequate, or future-proofing brand voices aren’t possible without full insight into roadmaps.
Here’s a simple insight we had: any time you ask anyone to write in another voice with different goals than their own internal ones, they’re playing a role. They’re roleplaying.
Looking at traditional roleplaying games, such as Dungeons and Dragons, Vampire: The Masquerade, etc we realized that despite the endless variations of output, all the character abilities and motivations can be boiled down into simple stat sheets. That different allocations of these stats are what make different characters mechanically different — and that these markers are what allow for people playing them to remember to act differently.
So, here’s SORCERER:
Step 1: Identify your traits
We identify brand traits that are directly attributable to how the brand acts and is perceived (or would like to be) by its audience. Very often, this can be based off existing brand strategy work, but we recommend doing an additional social brand tone of voice exercise to function as the global master-level archetype.
Step 2: Determine your game
It helps to know what type of game we’re playing. Is it about creating city-specific personas? Neighborhood specific? Audience or genre specific? Are we creating personas to target different sports teams? Technically SORCERER can work agnostically of all this, but it helps us to have a seed to develop a breakdown on, and to use that seed to validate how we set the personas up.
These seed sources allow for us to break up, stratify and assign meaning to the desired brand attributes. (eg what’s the output of a 1 in APPROACHABILITY vs a 5). The number alone doesn’t help.
Step 3: Build your rules
The system is extended into a rule book for the brand. We basically create a character creation guide that brands will be able to use going forward. The outcome of this are persona sheets that allows for the brands to create personas as needed.
Typically for the first rollout, we run this exercise with you and your initial brand persona targets. This is ideally an engaging exercise with your wider brand and social teams that allows for all members to be engaged and begin to understand the differentiating characteristics of what makes each brand persona different.
For example: You’re a pretty posh NYC brand that is extending out into the Midwest. You want to carry some of that cache with you, but not so much as to be distinctly out of place and aloof in your new region, especially with the consumers in that region online. (Is your brand up-market in Soho, but a more main-street vibe in Kansas City?).
It’s amazing what a visual cue will do to help underscore the differences to your team. Still the same brand, but able to be expressed slightly differently.
Step 4: Start playing
The end result: our clients get an extensible persona system that allows for adaptation and flexibility, while still being in-line withe core brand. The entire social team has buy-in, and a consolidated way forward.
Want to play? Let’s build some personas together. Shoot us an email.
Ben Peters is a senior strategist at Struck. He’s currently obsessed with retro gaming, the microbiome and Image comics. He also thinks Twitter is pretty good.
Dustin Davis is a creative director at Struck. He loves espresso and hot dogs. But not together. Never together. Also comics. And Twitter.
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