CHAT BACK: How deep is your love?

In advertising, direct is usually good. But if you’re trying to create a brand personality, much like a real person it needs to have more depth. More flexibility across a wider range of messages and audiences. Maybe even mood swings. Design and language need to work together to build a brand, evolving over time as it grows up. One rings pretty hollow without the other.

Fashion and luxury brands like to dazzle you with how beautiful they are, but they rarely use words to say anything other than begrudgingly tell you where to buy their stuff. If you’re lucky, you may already know the back-story or some mythology about their head designers, if not, you’re stuck with pretty pictures and a snatch of attitude. It’s a sneaky way of getting you to project your desires onto them, therefore seeing them as an extension of yourself, rather than just another multinational manufacturer of product.

On the flip side, brands that are word-heavy, financial institutions for example, have a reputation for being a bit boring, you just want to dip in, get what you need and dash out again. Love them or hate them, you at least have a sense of a relationship with banks. Conversations are two-way and you wouldn’t think twice about picking up the phone to them.

The aloof luxury approach is starting to break down. Brands that are used to getting away with stone-face beauty and silence are waking up in the era of social networking and suddenly finding not only do they have nothing to say, but no idea how to say it.

When everyone wants to start a conversation, having an engaging personality is more important than ever.

As any good marketeer will tell you, a brand’s personality is how it brings its strategy to life. It’s the marriage of visual and verbal identity together that create strength from consistency and differentiation.

If the idea at the heart of the brand is a central organising principle that drives everything the business does, then the personality is this idea brought to life and let off the leash. It should never be a clunky tag-on, but a clear articulation that’s created in tandem with the brand strategy by people that understand how both should work.

Considering how crucial a brand personality is, I find it baffling how little time is spent defining, discussing and perfecting verbal identity compared to its glamorous big sister, design, considered by many to be the sexy end of branding. A picture paints a thousand words. In my book, that still leaves several million others to choose from, even if you do call a spade a spade.

Everyone’s an expert in design, in as much as, they know what they like. The whole idea of it being open to interpretation means there are no wrong answers, unlike writing, where you can suddenly find yourself at the school prom with no trousers on and nowhere to hide.

Writing can be wrong.

Even with something as simple as a statement of ‘what we do’, everyone has an angle. Everyone has an agenda. And every word pulls one or the other in a different direction. Sometimes people are so busy looking for what’s being said that they never even pause to reflect on how it’s being said. That’s a chance too good to miss.

The best brands see the big picture. They speak volumes, both visually, and verbally. As much as an Andy Warhol can of soup has nothing to do with soup, the Apple brand has nothing to do with computers and Nike aren’t about shoes, how you say the things you say is the best indication of who you are. It’s where your personality and attitude start to really shine through and win people over.

Individually, visual and verbal identity can be powerful communicators of a brand’s personality. United, they’re unstoppable.