Lessons
Lesson Info
Your Brand's Personality
We wanna create a human personality for our brand. We wanna blend a few aspects here, so we wanna talk about what our personality is, mixed with what the personality is of someone that your community might really enjoy. A good person, a good friend to your community. Okay, so our first exercise here is to create a human personality for your brand, all right? So write out the characteristics of this personality. What I like doing is just making a bulleted list of the characteristics of the personality that I want my brand to have. So some examples I have, for me, is funny. I want my brand to always be a little bit funny and witty and smart. I want my brand to be compassionate, to be emotional and care about others and care about my community. I want my brand to always be thoughtful, I want to not just launch things and release things without having any thought put into it. I wanna make every decision very intentional and thoughtful so that I can be as smart as possible about what I'm do...
ing. I want my brand to always feel really informal, so I don't want to feel really stuffy and formal in any situation. I wanna feel really casual all the time. And then lastly, I want my brand to be a little bit sassy, like I just want to be a little punchy as well, and a little bit cutthroat, but just in a kind way. All right, so if we could go down the row and just kind of like loosely just mention some qualities of what your brand's personality might be. Um, yeah, I think it would be probably appreciating good design, caring, like caring about the customers and the community. Like, tech-forward, but also, like you said, informal. Perfect. Would you say, sorry to put the mic back on you. No problem. Would you say that do you feel like that's just your personality or do you feel like it's changing at all in any way to serve your community better? I mean, I feel like that's probably mostly my personality, but I do feel like it serves, at least the community that I want to serve, there may be some people that are more formal in my community, but-- That makes sense. Do you think that there are any aspects of your personality that you might want to not reflect in your brand's personality? Yeah, I mean maybe I can be a little too sarcastic and sometimes, so maybe I'd wanna be a little bit more, I mean sometimes sarcasm can be a little negative, so maybe I wanna be a little more positive. That makes sense. Yeah. Okay. I want my brand to be confidence-inspiring, so like the friend that you want to go to the networking event with you because they just make you feel more confident. I'll stop there. (laughing) Personality traits, I would say funny, and casual, but also really thoughtful, and imperfect as opposed to being super-slick. So mine, I think, my characteristics would be stylish and artsy but also kinda funny and confident. I wrote down introspective but also fun and playful, open and respectful. Collaborative, curious, witty, enthusiastic and detail-oriented. Perfect, these are all great. You're off to a good start. Okay, so now that we've all determined what our personality is, at least with these bulleted lists of explanations and sort of different personality traits, let's talk about how we can actually apply that. I want you all to list three examples of how you can show your personality to your community. I want you all to keep in mind different things like social media, how you can show people in social media posts what your personality is, how you can show that in marketing, so if you do any marketing, whether it's newsletter campaigns or doing social media marketing or in person marketing, whether you're creating a web experience of some kind through your product, your app or your website. In-person experiences are a really easy way to show your personality as well, it's creating in-real-life experiences for others. And then lastly, as we touched on a little bit before, is copywriting. How you can show off your personality in copywriting. So I'll walk through some of my examples for you. So for me, I think that a way that I can show my personality in my brand is through comedically-styled videos on Instagram. So I can be funny on Instagram, that's a really great way for me to show my imperfect, sort of casual, funny brand is through funny videos online. Thought-provoking interviews on websites with industry leaders, I think that's a really great way to both support your community but also include them in your brand and show off your personality. So that's doing a lot of things at once. And then the third thing is through interactive, in-person experiences to get the community thinking. In-person experiences are a great way to show off your personality, cause you can have them be whatever you want them to be to describe your personality to really push that forward. So for mine it's gonna be really fun and really interactive and a place for people to rapidly be themselves inside of this wonderful experience, and it's a really great way to get my community into my environment, to feel my personality and also to interact with that. All right, so if we could just go down the row and mention one way that you think you can show your personality to your community. Yeah, I think blogging, or showing images of my process and how I create the final product and really being open about that. Sharing simple tips to help them build a stronger brand. I like to create these stories that subvert expectations, so it'll start following a format that you're familiar with and then there's a funny twist at the end. Oh, that's wonderful. I always think I'd like to do product photos but in unusual or surprising settings. I was thinking about showing more process, so that can include mistakes, but also be a baseline for more playfulness and humor. Kind of in a similar vein to the process comments, but I love doing a bunch of research on projects at the very beginning, and love kind of sharing that I think would be an interesting way to show I'm curious and passionate about what it is that I'm working on. Absolutely. I'm noticing that some of you have things that you've already been doing, which is great, so things that you're already doing to kind of show off your personality and your brand, but a lot of you also have new things that you want to start doing. So it's important, whenever you're doing this exercise to kind of assess what you're already doing and how that might be positively impacting your community, but also think about what you could do to push that personality further. All right, moving on. So let's talk about what your brand values. So as we've mentioned before, your brand's values should be a reflection and a combination of what you value, as well as what your community values. Put those together into a list of three brand values that you might have. So what I came up with is collaboration, I value collaboration so much, and so does my community. My community definitely also wants to collaborate with one another, and so that's something that my brand also values, cause we all value it together, it's beautiful. Another thing is playfulness. Play is so important and having fun is important to me, as a person, also to my community, so of course my brand also values playfulness. And then finding humor in every situation is something that I value, something my community values, and therefore something that my brand also values. Another very important one, and another easy one to push out into everything that I make and give out to my community. So if we could just go down and kind of mention, maybe one value that you think your brand should have that your community has and you also have. I think transparency is a big thing in Silicon Valley and the tech community, like, open source and that sort of stuff. so sharing. Honesty, just kind of being real. Inclusivity and accessibility. I think like playful designs. Curiosity. Tiny details. (laughter) Specifically tiny details. You're all so fast. The tiniest of details. Yes, the smallest possible detail. All right. Very awesome. So I'm sure you're already starting to think about different ways that you can also bring your values into the experience that you're creating for your community. There are so many ways, as we mentioned through web experiences, through in-person experiences, through social media, and through the product or the service that you're actually doing for your audience and your community. It's really, really easy to have that as a baseline of what your values are, so that you can start making decisions and start actually pushing those forward. It's gonna create a lot of trust and a lot of excitement for your brand to have such a strong personality that's rooted in values.
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Ratings and Reviews
Juliette
I just absolutely love this course and keep coming back to it. As a creative freelancer i love that i can relate to Meg's advices and to her " imperfect " and funny side - which i totally have too and it feels sooooooo freeing to hear someone whose work you admire admitting and being proud of it !
a Creativelive Student
It was so incredible to hang out in the live studio audience for this class!(Despite having NO voice! ...thanks for being so kind and patient with me!) As a brand designer, it's actually so hard to get outside of my own business and think about my brand in new ways and Meg's course was so helpful in doing just that. Thank you for your fun and super helpful knowledge bombs, Meg!
Annie Wong
I know a lot of artists and designers like myself that cringe at traditional business marketing advice because it sounds gross and antithetical to the creative process. Meg has the amazing ability to humanize the idea of branding in a way that makes complete sense. The a-ha moment for me was when she reframes thinking about our "audience" and "users" as our "community." This was so helpful for me because a few days after the class a couple of members of my community expressed some concerns to me and I was able to address them in a way that was authentic. I might have dismissed their concerns before, but I realized that I have a responsibility as the steward of my brand to cultivate a safe space for my community. Thanks, Meg!