So, here’s the thing about brands: We talk about brands having a face and a voice. We talk about trying to build relationships and trust. We talk about growing a reputation.
And then we give them GreenPeanutCorp.
GreenPeanutCorp is hard to get to know. It always feels like it’s putting on an act. It’s generally honest, but you feel the need to check its facts anyway. It can be informative to listen to, but you never feel inclined to conversation. And that’s probably because GreenPeanutCorp is a brand, a company, a seller of sustainable packing peanuts, and nobody cares about getting to know a brand.
It’s easy to get frustrated when you’ve got a nice brand, with a persona and a standards manual and everything, and you’re still struggling to build awareness or affinity, or even just a cohesive marketing strategy that doesn’t give you that vague sense of “this just isn’t working for me, I don’t know why.” Which is why there’s this guy I want you to meet.
But first: Brand personas.
As creatives, we’re given a number of tools to do our job and make sure the whole team is on the same page. We get creative briefs that define the parameters of our work, and customer/audience personas that help us understand who we’re creating for, and brand personas that, theoretically, help us understand who we’re creating about.
They are, sincerely, great. They helpfully define traits like innovative! And dynamic! And friendly! And you get your mission and your vision, which are crucial information, and you know your brand voice is exciting and when your tone is serious vs. approachable. And then you sit down to write a blog post for a brand that is innovative and approachable and wants to become the world leader in sustainable packing peanuts, and you’re struggling because brands don’t talk.
We talk about brand voice and face and persona like they’re these disembodied entities separate from the organization — like the answer to not being a soulless, faceless corporation is to glue a face onto the front of it. (You’re welcome for the nightmare fuel.) And then that doesn’t work, and we wonder why, and it’s because we never bothered talking to Justin.
Meet Justin.
I once worked with a client named Justin. I mean, the client wasn’t named Justin, but the brand was definitely a guy named Justin. Justin is in his mid-thirties, recently married, no kids yet but seriously considering it. He’s the middle child of three and was a little salty about it growing up but came into his own during college. Justin is exceptionally smart and sometimes has to work at not wandering into some pretty high-level weeds, but overall he makes it happen. He’s middlingly helpful with bar trivia but a reliable go-to for information under other circumstances. He’s fun to hang out with and easy to talk to.
Justin is great to work with, and so flexible. On the website, he’s clear and authoritative but accessible — he really wants you to understand what he’s talking about. In blog posts, he’s a little more accessible and a little less authoritative — you always feel like he respects you and is talking to you and not down to you. (When it’s a byline elsewhere, he does lock it down a bit to make sure he’s appropriately professional on someone else’s turf.)
In his ads, he’s Fun Justin. He’s One and a Half Beers Justin. He jokes. He gets a little talky, often about himself, but you don’t mind because he’s still fun. Sometimes it makes you like him even more. Justin is never mean, or Too Much — he’s easy to talk to, easy to listen to, easy to trust, and easy to respect, and all those things are real, authentic Justin. Any time you run into Justin, you feel like he’s being himself. And you really like himself.
But why does it matter?
It matters because our job is to, as noted, build relationships, trust, with our customers. We want people to take that sense of competence and openness they gained from a blog post and carry it with them to a product page. To follow a familiar, natural path from an email to a landing page. To click from an ad to a webinar and not feel like they’ve been lured into something other than what they’ve been promised.
Without a concrete idea of who the brand really is — with a department of siloed copywriters and content writers and PR people all working from their own interpretation of what “innovative” and “approachable” and “serious” look like — we’re left with a sense of dissonance, and customers who feel like they’re being sold to and not talked with.
And that doesn’t work. Because those customers might be closing sales with GreenPeanutCorp, but it’s because they trust Justin to follow through on his promises.
Red Bull’s name is Tyler.
This isn’t just me. You’re seeing this in some of the biggest brands — they might not go so far as to give their brand a name, but you can bet they know how old they are, how they dress, what they do on weekends, and what their friends think of them.
You might not know exactly what Apple’s marketing team has nailed down about their brand, but you know you’d trust him to go on and on about the newest cool thing but usually be right about it, and you really don’t enjoy hanging out with him but you sometimes do because you feel like you should. Red Bull tends to be A Lot, but you actually enjoyed going mountain biking with him that time even though you crashed, and he’s a surprisingly good listener.
And you know these things because the brand is so consistent from ad to website to blog to byline — a little different in each context, but you always know it’s that guy who willingly gave up that fedora when you explained it to him, or the one who sleeps for two days after a moto but is then ready to hang out. Because they aren’t just a brand persona — they’re a brand person.
Get your own Justin.
One more thing to know about Justin: Coming up with your Justin is a lot of fun.
Obviously your brand isn’t going to have a Justin — Justin’s brand had a Justin because their tone and personality and spirit were all embodied by Justin. You might have a Maggie, or a Howard, or a Nevaeh or something. The activity of outlining your brand person — and this is a department-wide thing, because everyone has perspective on who your person is — is unifying and fun.
And now you have a great tool for assessing your marketing efforts. Our homepage — is that how Maggie would say it? If Howard were introducing this webinar, would he look comfortable doing it? If I asked Nevaeh to explain this product to me, is this how she’d describe it? You have your brand standards to adhere to, and your brand strategy, and now you have your answer to that vague “this just isn’t working.” Run it by Helene and see what she thinks.
Helene is great. Kind of slow to pick up on jokes sometimes, but definitely knows her stuff.
We like Helene.
Oh, just one more thing: We’re not actually done here. Today’s discussion naturally leads into a definitive discussion of the Copywriting vs. Content Writing debate. How does it naturally lead into that? Check back here next week to see.