Brand personality canvas: What if your company was a real person?
A tool to put a human face (and more) to your company, and its surprisingly valuable effects for your culture and business.
Have you ever considered what would your company be like if it was a real person? What will it eat, read, watch? What are its hobbies and favorite destinations? Which superhero would it be and who Hollywood star would have played its role? Well, intrigued by our curiosity and playfulness we decided to share a fun exercise within our team to discover our human traits as a company. After all, we are big fans of design thinking and empathy — it would be a shame not applying them to understand our own culture and voice.
It’s not all play: the benefits of personifying your company
“This seems like a nice, fun activity for an after work gathering”, you might think. But it’s more than that — it’s valuable for your company, as it sheds light to the way your people see their employer and its culture. Furthermore, it reveals sides of your company that can be interpreted in business terms — but you’ll read more on that further down.
How to run the experiment
You don’t need to hire a design thinking team to run this exercise. It’s easy to set it up either digitally or in pen & paper (but do consider the environment, please!). You’ll even find ready templates online if you have no time to prepare one, but we strongly suggest to customize it to your liking — don’t forget to add your logo, too!
So, here’s what we did. we built a Brand Personality Canvas urging our team to complete the following statements and questions:
- Found.ation reads:
- Watches:
- Listens:
- Eats:
- Found.ation’s favourite destination:
- Found.ation’s favourite hobby:
- What animal would Found.ation be?
- Which superhero would Found.ation be?
- If Found.ation was a character in a movie, they would be played by:
Found.ation is…
Everyone tried to empathize with Found.ation and shared their view combined with their own personality traits and perspectives. Therefore, we crafted a narrative that combines the patterns unveiled over the team’s responses. Here are the results:
Music: If Found.ation was a person, it would definitely have a great taste — like, in everything. A classic rock fan (Beatles, David Bowie), also loving alternative music (Radiohead), but is also keeping an eye (or better, an ear) to latest current trends (Amelie Lens).
Reading: a lot. A love for the world of fantasy is obvious: graphic novels, comics, science fiction, Harry Potter (oh well, Found.ation is still a young person). As a youngster it is aspiring for success so you will also find books such as the Lean Startup on its bookshelf.
Watching: Found.ation loves experimenting, improvising, trying hard and it knows that the greatest teacher, failure is — so many learnings to extract from the “Star Wars” movie series. Whenever there is an appetite for popcorn, “Friends” will do, but its insatiable thirst for knowledge asks for great documentaries as well.
Eating: Found.ation loves salads and vegetables, but it identifies as a flexitarian (a souvlaki or spare ribs once in a while, yum), it loves pasta and pizza, but it also loves sushi and falafel. Well, it loves food. It loves a full stomach. Full stop.
Vacations: luckily enough, Found.ation resides in Greece, which means that there are so many islands who have turned to favourite holiday destinations. It mostly prefers Cyclades, but Crete, Zakynthos and Corfu serve as great alternatives. When it packs up for another country, one destination is the ultimate: Japan (aka a paradise for geeks and techies).
Animal: If Found.ation was an animal, it would be an owl. Hence the wisdom. Or a chameleon. Hence the adaptability. Or finally, a cheetah. Hence the speed. Just don’t call it a kitten. -_-
Hobby: Found.ation burns the extra calories hiking, always chasing peaks. But its most favourite hobby is gaming. It doesn’t matter if it is video games or board games. The important thing is to sharpen its strategy skills.
Super powers! If you are looking for extraordinary powers here, then Iron Man, Batman or Wonder Woman are the beloved characters who could be the superheroic alter egos of Found.ation. Because we are genius, powerful and know what it takes to manage big companies — get it? ;-)
Fancying some famous Hollywood stars playing these roles? Well, the team believes that Keanu Reeves, Johnny Depp and Uma Therman would be ideal to play the roles! Pity no one thought of “Transformers” as a favorite Found.ation movie though, isn’t it?
So, then what?
Then we challenged the status quo a bit more. At our weekly team sync call, when the Head of every department follows an agenda of informing the team and discussing about the progress of projects, important company news, following activities and feedbacks, a member from the Content & Outreach team shared a presentation with the results. How would you react if at your company’s weekly brief, when everyone is expected to be serious and professional, a bunch of gifs, sarcastic comments, inside jokes and even conversations about Batman being a billionaire tech-savvy who should act as your role model appeared in your screen? Well, we laughed. A lot. And we continued our work day fueled by Batman’s ambitions and work ethic.
Team’s engagement and motivation can be triggered by the most unpredictable, simplest and funniest ways.
All it takes is to bring onboard all team members, from top level management to junior and frontline employees, ask for their contribution and share the outcome with them. Beyond that, the framework can be used for branding purposes as well.
Finding your human characteristics as a brand, you can build a personality and a tone of voice which consumers can relate with.
So, what if your company was a real person? You can download and use the Brand Personality Canvas ppt we created here. Enjoy!
Navigating the new reality is not easy. Let’s do this together. Explore our full line of consulting services for businesses at thefoundation.gr.
