Unbelievable Brand Personalities

Following on from a talk by Mark Palmer from Maverick Planet (and former Head of Strategy at Bates, OMD, WCRS, and BMP), I found myself getting nostalgic for my own job.

He'd been speaking about how brands can establish a personality - but that this identity must always derive from a genuine aspect of the company's activities. Tango, for instance, could credibly lay claim to being a "fun" brand, as drinking sugary fizzy drinks tends to bring out the best/worst in your average child.

The problem lies when a company just decides to adopt a personality that has no relevance to their product or working methods - usually because they've seen an unrelated organisation (Apple and Innocent the most likely culprits) achieve success and praise and want to emulate it.

As an Account Manager I used to work for a train company, who had somehow decided that they wanted our marketing to make them quirky and fun, showing us marketing from Ben & Jerry's as the style they wanted to go for. No-one seemed to have the heart to tell them that eating ice cream is fun, whereas nothing in the process of travelling on their trains remotely approached it.

They even asked us to add animals (zebras and giraffes) to the illustrations (of a train in the English countryside), because they liked the cows in Ben & Jerry's marketing. Again, no one felt it appropriate to mention that cows and ice cream have a close connection that isn't exactly present in zebras and trains.

Why more people - actually working in Marketing - don't get this kind of simple education is a mystery.