Hey creators, confession time. Think about the brands you actually follow. Not the ones you buy from out of habit, the ones you would notice if they went quiet. Chances are they do not behave like companies. They behave like characters. They have a tone, a sense of humour, opinions, running jokes, bad days they admit to and causes they will defend in public. You could describe them the way you would describe a person, and if you asked their followers to do the same, the descriptions would match.
That matching is the whole game in branding today. A brand is a personality before it is a logo, and the feed has made that literal.
what we mean by a character
In our Branding 101 course, we teach that good branding turns a company into a coherent character with goals, challenges, passion and vulnerability. Not a mascot. A character. A character has a core that does not change and a surface that can play. They know what they believe, they speak in one recognisable voice, and they react to the world the way their personality says they should.
This is not new theory. Jungian archetypes, which we have written about on this blog, gave brands a vocabulary for character a century ago: the rebel, the jester, the caregiver, the creator. What is new is the stage. A character used to be performed in campaigns, a few times a year, in media the brand controlled. Now the character performs daily, in comments and replies and stories, in spaces the brand does not control, in front of an audience that talks back.
the founder became the face
The clearest proof is how many modern brands are inseparable from a person. We wrote about Jacquemus on this blog, a luxury house built less on heritage than on the founder’s own world, shared personally, in his own voice.
“People love to see something personal. They don’t just follow a brand, they follow a person.” (Simon Porte Jacquemus)
You do not need to be a fashion house for this to apply. The bakery owner who narrates the morning bake, the contractor who explains the mistake and the fix, the studio that posts the messy middle of a project: these are characters being built in public, and they convert followers into customers because people trust people, and a brand with a person inside it feels like a person. (We went deep on this in our piece on the human connection, if you want the long version.) Edelman’s trust research keeps landing in the same place: consumers trust brands they experience directly and personally, more than they trust institutions, and 81% need to trust a brand before buying from it.
character is a consistency test
Here is the part most brands miss. A character is not a tone of voice document. A character is what you get when the same personality shows up under pressure, at speed, in public, for a year. The witty brand that goes silent during a crisis has revealed its character just as clearly. The polished brand whose replies sound like legal counsel has one too.
This is why character driven branding is a strategy question before it is a content question. You have to decide, in advance, what your brand believes, what it finds funny, what it will apologise for and what it will never do. Those decisions are the script. Without them, every post is an improvisation, and improvisation across a team and a year produces a blur. Blurred characters get forgotten. Sharp ones get described, quoted and chosen, by people and, increasingly, by the AI systems that summarise brands for a living.
flaws are features now
Traditional branding treated flaws as leaks to plug. Character branding treats the right flaws as the most believable parts of the story. The anti-branding movement we covered on this blog made a tactic of it: admit the limitation, laugh at yourself first, let the product carry the pitch. A character with no flaws is not aspirational anymore. It is suspicious. Audiences raised on behind the scenes everything can smell a facade, and a facade is the one character nobody follows twice.
This does not mean performing vulnerability as a strategy, which audiences can also smell. It means the brand’s actual personality, including the rough edges that come with it, is allowed to be visible. The goal is not to seem human. It is to be recognisably yourself, at scale.
building your character, practically
Start where the course starts: the core. Mission, values, vision, in plain language, decided once and written down. Then the voice: three adjectives that describe how the character speaks, and three that describe how it never speaks. Then the tests. What would this character say about a price increase, a mistake, a competitor’s win, a cause in the news? Answering in the calm of a workshop is what makes the answers fast and consistent in the wild.
Then let the character out. Show the founder or the team. Narrate the process, not just the launch. Reply like the character, not like a policy. And keep the visual world coherent with the verbal one, because a character whose look and voice disagree reads as two brands sharing a name.
the point of the character
A logo can be copied in an afternoon. A price can be matched in a day. A character, built in public over years, cannot be cloned, because its value is the accumulated memory of how it behaved. In an age when products are comparable in one search and introductions are written by machines, the personality is the moat. Build the character first. Everything else, the design, the content, the campaigns, is costume.
keep reading
- How Jacquemus built cultural relevance without heritage
- The human connection: brand loyalty is part of your customer’s identity
- Anti-branding: when brands rebel against the status quo
frequently asked questions
What is character driven branding?
It is building a brand the way you would build a fictional character: a fixed core of values and beliefs, a recognisable voice, and consistent behaviour across every situation, so audiences can describe the brand the way they would describe a person.
Does every brand need a founder as its face?
No. A person helps, because people trust people, but the character can be carried by a team, a mascot-like presence or a strongly defined collective voice. What matters is that a consistent personality is visible somewhere.
How is brand character different from brand voice?
Voice is how the character speaks. Character is the whole person: beliefs, behaviour, reactions and flaws. Voice is one component of character, the way wording is one component of a personality.
Can a serious brand have a character?
Yes. Character is not the same as comedy. A law firm can be the calm, precise, dry witted character in its category. The test is recognisability and consistency, not jokes.
sources
- Edelman, 2025 Trust Barometer Special Report: Brand Trust, From We to Me; Edelman findings on trust before purchase, compiled in Brand Consistency Statistics
- Delusional, Branding 101 course (brand as character; mission, values and vision as the core), Notion course library
- Delusional, How Jacquemus, a modern brand, built cultural relevance without heritage
- Delusional, Anti-branding: when brands rebel against the status quo
Photos: 1898 Michelin poster by O’Galop (public domain) and Michelin Man photo by 35mmMan, via Wikimedia Commons; others free from Pexels, by Polina Tankilevitch and cottonbro studio.
