3.2 Creating relatable characters and brand personas

Creating relatable characters and brand personas is crucial for effective brand storytelling. These elements give your brand a human face, making it more accessible and engaging for your audience. By crafting compelling characters, you can forge emotional connections and bring your brand's values to life.

Character arcs and brand personas help model the transformation you want your audience to experience. By aligning character traits with audience preferences, you can create stories that resonate deeply. Remember, the key is to develop characters that feel authentic and relatable to your target market.

Characters for Brand Storytelling

The Role of Characters in Engaging Audiences

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• Characters serve as the primary vehicles for audiences to connect with a brand story on an emotional level
  • Relatable characters make the story and message more engaging and memorable by providing a human element that people can identify with
• Effective brand characters embody the core values, personality and voice of the brand in human form
  • This personification makes the brand more accessible and creates a sense of relationship between the audience and the brand by giving it a relatable face and presence
• Characters provide a consistent touchpoint that can be leveraged across multiple brand story campaigns and initiatives
  • Recurring characters build familiarity and affinity over time, becoming recognizable ambassadors for the brand
  • Characters can appear in different story contexts (ads, social media posts, events) to reinforce brand messaging

Using Characters to Communicate Brand Messages

• Character dialogue, actions and choices throughout the story create opportunities to communicate key brand messages and calls to action
  • Characters can demonstrate the brand promise in relatable situations that illustrate the value proposition
  • Character choices can model desired customer behaviors and relationships to the brand or product
• Compelling characters encountering conflicts and obstacles create dramatic tension that draws the audience into the story
  • The audience becomes invested in following the characters' journeys, motivating them to engage with the brand to see the resolution
  • Challenges characters face can mirror customer pain points that the brand can solve

Crafting Brand Personas

Defining the Ideal Customer Archetype

• Brand personas are fictional characters that represent the brand's ideal customer
  • They are composite archetypes based on research into the demographics, psychographics, behaviors, and goals of the target audience
  • Personas encapsulate the most important characteristics of key customer segments
• Effective brand personas have detailed backstories, personality traits, and motivations that align with the brand's core values and mission
  • This makes the persona feel like a real, authentic person that embodies what the brand stands for
  • Backstory details could include the persona's education, career path, family life, hobbies and interests
• Personas should reflect the diversity of the target audience, including factors such as age, gender, ethnicity, education level, profession, and family status
  • Inclusivity makes the brand story relatable to more people by representing their varied experiences and identities
  • A brand may develop multiple personas to capture different segments within their audience

Bringing Brand Personas to Life

• Naming and visualizing the persona with images helps bring them to life for both the brand team and the audience
  • The persona becomes a distinct character rather than just a collection of data points
  • A memorable name (Jane the Fitness Enthusiast) and photo/illustration make the persona more concrete
• Brand personas should have specific goals, challenges, and pain points relevant to what the brand offers
  • This allows the brand story to position products and services as the ideal solution for the persona
  • Understanding persona motivations and struggles enables the brand to tailor messaging to their needs
• Personas can be integrated into brand touchpoints as relatable characters
  • Persona profiles can be referenced in marketing and advertising to demonstrate customer understanding
  • Persona-based characters can be used in brand story campaigns to represent the target audience

Character Arcs for Growth

Mapping Transformational Journeys

• Character arcs map out how a character grows, changes, and evolves over the course of a story
  • The character's journey involves facing challenges, making difficult choices, and ultimately being transformed in some way
  • Arcs have a clear beginning, middle, and end that trace the character's progression
• A positive character arc shows the character developing new strengths, overcoming flaws, and becoming a better version of themselves
  • This inspires the audience and aligns with brand stories about empowerment and aspiration
  • The character could start out uncertain and end up confident, or move from being self-centered to more compassionate
• A negative character arc involves the character succumbing to their flaws or weaknesses and ending up worse off than when they started
  • This type of arc can be used in brand stories as a cautionary tale or to highlight the consequences of not adopting the brand's offering
  • The character might refuse to change a bad habit and face negative impacts on their health and relationships

Modeling Brand-Inspired Transformation

• Character arcs in brand stories often parallel the transformation the brand wants the audience to undergo
  • The character's journey models the shift in mindset and behavior the brand aims to spark
  • A fitness brand could show a character becoming more active and confident, reflecting the results customers hope to achieve
• Setbacks and moments of doubt make a character arc feel more realistic and relatable
  • Showing vulnerability creates empathy and sets up a more emotionally satisfying resolution
  • The character might struggle to maintain a new habit but ultimately find strategies that work for their lifestyle
• Positive character arc resolutions provide a sense of inspiration and empowerment
  • The character emerges transformed, having grown through adversity
  • Audiences feel motivated to undergo similar journeys in their own lives with the brand's help

Character Traits vs Audience Preferences

Reflecting the Target Audience

• Researching the target audience provides insights into the traits they find most relatable and aspirational in characters
  • These can include demographics, personality traits, skills, values, and communication styles
  • Surveys and focus groups can uncover what attributes audiences identify with or look up to
• Audience personas and psychographics help define the worldviews, belief systems, and motivations that should be reflected in brand characters
  • For example, an audience that values social responsibility would relate to a character who makes ethical choices and takes stands on important issues
  • A persona focused on career advancement would respond to a proactive, ambitious character
• When characters need to evolve to changing audience preferences, their core traits should be maintained for consistency
  • Subtle shifts in attitudes and actions can realign the character without sacrificing recognizability
  • A long-running character known for humor could tone down the jokes and show more empathy if audience tastes change

Optimizing Relatability Over Time

• Continuously gathering audience feedback and data on character perceptions allows for refinement over time
  • The relatability of characters can be optimized based on engagement metrics like views, likes, and comments
  • Surveys can assess how well characters are resonating and identify areas for improvement
• Tracking cultural trends and the popularity of certain archetypes in entertainment media provides a reference for the kinds of characters that are resonating with audiences at a given time
  • The rise of underdog heroes or anti-heroes in popular culture could inform character development
  • Monitoring social media conversations reveals which public figures are capturing audience attention and why
• A/B testing different character traits and story arcs can help determine which elements are most effective with the target audience
  • Varying a character's actions, dialogue or appearance and measuring engagement lifts insights into audience preferences
  • Character variations that outperform become the new template for brand stories going forward