Brand Personality: An Extra Lens to Transform Products and Services
In this article, I share my thoughts and what I’ve learned so far, applying the mindset and tools I’ve used while developing personalities to the design of the encounter between products, services, and people. Go grab something to drink and let’s get started!
My job entails helping brands become stronger and last over time, and I’ve always detected common aspects between branding and experience design. One of them is how relevant the emotional element becomes when it comes to establishing a connection with the users that we, as strategists and facilitators, seek to address. Although they’re part of different scenarios and use different tools, both disciplines seek to connect with people’s circumstances and feelings, going beyond the functional or utilitarian value proposition that’s intrinsic to the acquisition of products or services.
For decades, a series of changes have been transforming how we, the people, behave regarding consumption, and how the brands, products, and services set up and deliver their value propositions. In a world full of options, businesses were forced to find ways to remain relevant from all points of view. Thus, the emotional components that are involved in the value creation were incorporated in the early stages: nowadays, brands, products, and services know they can turn into key players within the social fabric.
There are many ways of exploring the emotional component within the design of encounters. In this article, I’ll focus on just one: the product and service’s singularity highlight through brand personality techniques.
Humanization to forge bonds
Assigning human features to inanimate objects is an activity that has been performed for ages: about 40,000 years ago, in the Upper Paleolithic era, the first representations of humanoid animals and wizards were discovered.
Anthropomorphism, or an interpretation of what is not human or personal in terms of human or personal characteristics (Merriam Webster), is considered an innate tendency in human psychology. Did Tom Hanks and Wilson spring to your mind? You’re getting there. Or when there are few noodles on your plate and you draw a face…you’re getting there. We are social beings, so humanizing inanimate things usually comes up as a spontaneous exercise.
Nowadays, we live and interact with anthropomorphized brands, products, and artifacts. Apple was one of the first brands that shifted paradigms by using a creative direction that differed from the triggers used by brands in the technology industry at that moment. Apple’s iconic “Get a Mac” campaign of 2006 seems to be the height of personification: in the ads, a Mac was portrayed by a clever and chill young man who interacted with Windows, portrayed by a stubborn and far-fetched clerk.
That was a key moment in the road towards brand humanization. However, it’s crucial to understand that anthropomorphizing brands, products, or services doesn’t necessarily mean that we should take things to that level: it isn’t about literally representing human traits, but assigning qualities of human behavior to the artifacts we create, without them looking like people but behaving like them.
So, what’s the purpose behind anthropomorphism in branding and experience design? Forging emotional bonds. If the brands, products, or services we set up and develop have human features, then, like any living entity, they can have a history, express emotions, witness events, change over time, die, be reborn and undergo transformations.
The key to Alexa’s success was giving her a distinct personality. Unlike other smart assistants back then, Alexa had her own opinions.
Dave Limp, Senior Vice President for Devices & Services at Amazon
Alexa’s opinions were Amazon’s sweet spot since the company launched its assistant after Apple and Google. Alexa’s personality was aimed at making room for a new entity within the relationship between the brand and its users: she channels Amazon’s values in a genuine and bold way, and, for some, almost spontaneously.
So far it’s all quite fun. However, we should take some warnings into account. You’ve surely watched dystopic movies and series that take this topic of doting inanimate entities with a personality to the extreme, and they teach us that, beyond the illusion associated with the incorporation of this lens and its practices, we should know that
working with anthropomorphic figures means knowing that we can influence other people’s behavior in many aspects. Identifying those limits and their potential side effects is key. This means we should keep an eye on our professional ethics.
Setting up Personalities
In my opinion, the GPS that shows us the way in any product and service anthropomorphization activity should have 3 underlying concepts that inspire the personification: our product or service’s value proposition, the target users’ symbolic and consumption universe, and the brand concept or the mother brand’s mission statement, which it should be aligned with.
Paying attention to those concepts is key because they’ll allow us to carry out personification exercises based on strategy. In some cases, this documentation may not even exist, so you’ll have to make connections and agreements to get this material and ensure that everyone involved agrees with it.
So, what does “personality configuration” mean? It’s developing distinctive features for our product or service that will allow the design teams to give the product or service singular behavioral qualities regarding its relationship with users or target audiences.
Below, I list a series of lessons I’ve learned throughout my professional career. These aren’t universal facts, but, when I didn’t pay attention to them, things didn’t work out :’)
When Should We Start? ASAP
Tasks related to product or service personality should be carried out as soon as possible in a project for two main reasons: they usually inspire members of the teams to design and develop product features or service dynamics; and, most importantly, because they complement the value proposition.
Therefore, bearing in mind later personification activities during the discovery or research stages is key because, both in benchmarking and user research instances, there should be activities aimed at identifying the industry’s personality codes. Besides, we should get to know the users or target audience’s symbolic and consumption universes. All in all, if we get involved later, we’ll probably have less time to devote to these tasks, which are crucial to have a well-structured approach.
Collaboration: Include Key Players
You should organize sessions with collaborative exercises and deliberation stages, bringing key project players into these spaces; everyone can participate, and you and your team may even find the opportunity or the excuse to align the marketing and product perspectives during these ceremonies, especially in the case of those companies that have clearly defined structures and work in silos. Remember that the resulting personality may not be strictly manifested in the product or service you are designing along with your team, but also in all its platforms or communication and advertisement elements.
Logic and Organization: Appoint a Champ
For each activity, no matter how many exercises and sessions we carry out, there must be an orchestrator or champion in charge of moderating and reaching agreements. The champ will also develop the personality deliverable or, if that activity is trusted to another team member, they will agree on the fine details that will be documented, pursuing complete coherence and logic in the personality definition and adding design, communication, and writing guidelines.
Service Design: Look For Singularity Within your Artifacts Ecosystem
To design services, regardless of your artifact’s ecosystem architecture strategy, check each component and choose the ones that deserve to be endowed with a personality, seeking to stress their singularity within different touchpoints. Although there may be aspects that provide continuity or alignment, highlighting some artifacts’ qualities could add rhythm and suitability to the experience as a whole.
Myths to Debunked
So much has been written and I’ve heard amazing talks and debates about the relevance tools and techniques have gained regarding our professional practices. There’s a sort of belief that our success depends on the tools we choose to use. I bring you two myths I’ve identified both in students and professionals -including myself- who use tools or techniques to work on personality development:
Myth 1: Applying the tools I’ve used will magically add value to my product or service.
Not necessarily. If the facilitator that moderates the personality co-creation sessions doesn’t drive the participants to bring any distinctive features to the surface, then you won’t necessarily be adding a new value layer to the product or service you are developing.
When I take the role of creative director of digital products, I seek to get an “uneven formula”; that is to say, I make sure that the set of personality traits that sums up our entity’s behavior takes into account 2 or 3 features that contribute to the value delivery, while another remaining feature is based on the pursue of a distinctive trait, inherent to the product, and probably not expected by anybody.
This feature that’s inherent to the product creates tension regarding the conveyance of personality, which can turn into a differentiating attribute in terms of the product or service’s relationship with users.
Intelligent, humble, useful, and, sometimes, funny.
Amazon’s Alexa
We all expect smart assistants to be intelligent, useful, and modest, or at least not arrogant. However, how many of us expect them to be funny? The development of unexpected personality traits tends to increase engagement. Moreover, most of Alexa’s user reviews are about how gracefully she does her job.
The “uneven formula” and working with points of tension regarding personality traits are techniques used in soap opera, series, or movie characters that end up being loveable since they encompass multiple depth layers; in other words, they reflect real people’s complexity.
Myth 2: resorting to anthropomorphism is the only way to forge an emotional connection with our users or target audience.
Not necessarily. The functional aspects of the experience can also develop an emotional bond due to the organic value the solution adds to the users’ daily lives (I love it because it’s simple, I want it because it’s easy to use, I prefer it because it’s cheap, etc.)
Moreover, we should remember that personification is part of a broader technique: characterization. If you want to draw inspiration from other kinds of characterization, you could resort to other figures of speech, such as the metaphor or the allegory, which can be great allies to achieve singularity, helping users delve into a dimension of distinctive codes and, thus, increasing engagement levels.
What do the movie Parasite and the Buenos Aires Service Jams in quarantine have in common?
The house. In Parasite, the house owned by the Park family is a character in itself and it has the leading role: it sets the mood and communicates the film’s core message through a set of operating logics which lead to events that have an impact on the characters.
On the other hand, during quarantine, the hosts of the Buenos Aires Service Jams (an adorable community that’s crazy about service design) created “The Jam House”, a virtual space on Mural that looks like a home and triggers all the virtual activities ideated by the speakers to actively involve the assistants in each event.
Both in Parasite and the BA Service Jams, the house fixes certain uses and, consequently, it enables certain situations and disables others. In other words, it sets the interaction mechanics. The singularity level that can be achieved based on alternative characterization activities is really high. Regarding the design of encounters, working on the mechanics can be a suitable tool to orchestrate artifact ecosystems.
Translating Personalities
I’d also like to highlight the importance of the phase in which we start adding personality -which derives from the configuration stage- to our product or service. I call it “personality translation” because everything we know about the product or service now has to be conveyed through its appearance and behavior, and that’s what will do the trick to communicate with users in a distinctive way.
The personality booklet is the bridge between those two phases. The booklet is a deliverable that sums up all the definitions and agreements that result from the personality development sessions, and it has two main purposes: documenting the work to turn it into a reference, and ensuring that the aspects that define the product or service are coherent and make sense.
Personality booklets may have a structure tailored to what you think you’ll need. However, they usually gather the product or service’s value proposal and the personality representation elements, including examples and guidelines.
In its Brand Guidelines, Starbucks points at the same situation UX Writers and Visual Designers usually face: determining when we should be more expressive and when it’s key to be more rational, precise, and exact.
Therefore, our personality booklets should provide guidelines that detail those instances where the teams in charge of the personality translation can be more expressive and those where they should be strictly functional.
Starbucks is functional in critical purchase instances where being clear is important for the client’s decision-making process (menus, checkouts, shop signage), and ensuring agility in the staff service provision (back-office artifacts related to management) is also key.
However, Starbucks makes room for more expressivity in instances such as product introductions, packaged product descriptions, and brand advertising media. In these cases, language becomes more passionate and the graphics become artsier and less minimal. This means that the brand adjusts its expressivity while remaining faithful to its personality traits.
In the translation phase, it’s key to identify touchpoints aimed at exploiting the delight factor through personality. We’ll know we’ve done a good job if our product or service’s behavior is promptly and strategically administered.
It’s getting late, I’m leaving
Finally, I must say that what I’m writing about here can probably be implemented on challenges you are working on or embark on soon, though you may also feel this lens is too complex to apply in the projects you are working on at the moment.
We don’t expect our steering wheel to have personality.
Dave Limp, Senior Vice President for Devices & Services at Amazon
Don’t force it. We don’t have to add personality and illusion everywhere assuming it’s a formula that works to connect emotionally with people just because we’ve learned that it’s a trait inherent to our psychology. Remember that we should always use our work to deliver value and that we are using a lens aimed at improving the user experience, not damaging it. For the most utilitarian scenarios or certain audiences, we should probably stick to being functional and rational, and that will be okay too.
However, when you identify the possibility of applying anthropomorphic techniques to one of your projects, you should know that:
- You and your team will connect with challenges from a new perspective, further strengthening the product or service vision;
- You’ll be able to foster the development and/or characterization of future features and artifacts;
- You’ll work on the emotional connection with users and the differentiation from competitors;
- You’ll be in charge of directing a life over time, and/or of laying the foundations that will enable its existence.
Working on personality configuration and translation takes us on a journey from the most creative to the super clinical side. I encourage you to create entities with a soul that make you proud. The adventure never ends!
SourcesAnthropomorphism Definition. Merriam Webster.https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anthropomorphismCustomer Journey Mapping: The Path to Loyalty. Hogg, Stuart. Source: Think With Google, 2018.
https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/consumer-insights/consumer-journey/customer-journey-mapping/Ebaqdesign brand matrixes.Arek Dvornechuck, 2021.
https://www.ebaqdesign.com/Experience Design: A Framework for Integrating Brand, Experience, and Value. Newbery, Patrick. Farnham, Kevin. John Willey & Sons Inc. Hoboken, New Jersey, 2013. https://www.amazon.com/Experience-Design-Framework-Integrating-Brand/dp/1118609638How Alexa Got Her Personality. Roettgers, Janko. Source: Variety Online Magazine, 2019.
https://www.google.com.ar/amp/s/variety.com/2019/digital/news/alexa-personality-amazon-echo-1203236019/amp/Inside the House From Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite. Wallace, Rachel. Source: Architectural Digest Online Magazine, 2019.
https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/bong-joon-ho-parasite-movie-set-design-interviewLa importancia del factor de deleite en una marca. Source: Revista Summa, 2014.
https://revistasumma.com/51754/Starbucks Creative Expression. Source: Starbucks Creative.
https://creative.starbucks.com/UX Should be a Priority for Marketeers Too. Rathod, Atman. Source: Usability Geek. https://usabilitygeek.com/ux-should-be-a-priority-for-marketers/Virtual Spaces for Meaningful Interactions. Buenos Aires Service Jams. Source: Medium, 2020.
https://medium.com/baservicejams/virtual-spaces-for-meaningful-interactions-1e6232940b8f
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