Somewhere in a shared Google Drive — under a folder called “Brand Assets 2023” inside a folder called “Marketing” inside a folder called “Strategy” — lives a 38-page document titled “Brand Personality & Voice Guidelines.” It was produced by an agency, approved by a committee, presented to the board, and distributed to the team with great fanfare eighteen months ago. Nobody has read it twice. It describes the brand as “warm yet authoritative, innovative yet grounded, bold yet approachable.” It contains a section on brand archetypes that identifies the brand as simultaneously The Sage and The Explorer. The brand, in practice, sounds like a LinkedIn post from 2018 and communicates with all the warmth of an automated email from a company whose name you half-recognize.
The Production of Personality, Minus the Personality
Brand personality frameworks are a genuine intellectual exercise when done well. The attempt to distill a brand’s authentic character into a communicable set of principles — so that every touchpoint, from product copy to customer service email to social post, feels like it comes from the same coherent human sensibility — is real strategic work. The problem is that most frameworks are not distillations of existing authentic character. They are aspirational descriptions of a personality the brand would like to have, produced by people who consulted existing materials, ran a workshop, and arrived at adjectives that all the stakeholders found acceptable.
Acceptable is the enemy of personality. Personality is specific, sometimes polarizing, occasionally off-putting to certain audiences while deeply resonant with others. It has rough edges. It makes choices about what it won’t be in order to fully commit to what it is. Brand personality frameworks written by committee, reviewed for stakeholder comfort, and approved by legal tend to sand all of those edges until what remains is a set of adjectives that could apply to approximately 40% of brands in any given category.
“We’re bold but not aggressive, warm but not informal, innovative but not alienating.” Great. So is your competitor. And their competitor. The personality framework, in these cases, does not differentiate — it camouflages.
The Implementation Gap
The most generous reading of the brand personality framework problem is the implementation gap: the framework itself might be fine, but the organization lacks the capacity to execute it consistently. The brand voice guidelines say “conversational and direct” and the legal team turns every customer email into a formal notice. The guidelines say “bold and confident” and the CEO edits every campaign headline into something more hedged. The framework describes what the brand should be; the organization produces what the culture permits.
This is common and deeply frustrating, and it points to a truth that brand strategy documents tend to elide: brand personality lives in behavior, not in documents. The most precisely articulated brand personality in the world is worthless if the people making daily communication decisions don’t have the context, authority, and confidence to apply it. Training matters. Editorial judgment matters. A culture that allows creative risk-taking matters. A 38-page PDF distributed to an intranet does not.
The Brands That Actually Have Personality
The brands that are genuinely recognized for distinctive personality — the ones people describe in conversation, the ones that inspire loyalty and occasionally fierce criticism — share a few common features. They take positions. They have aesthetic convictions. They sound like a specific person, not like a consensus document. They’ve given something up in order to commit fully to something else.
Most of them also have a person — or a small group of people — who acts as a living embodiment of the brand personality and has the authority to make consistent decisions based on it. The brand personality doesn’t live in a document. It lives in the judgment of a person who deeply understands what the brand is and has enough creative and organizational freedom to express it consistently.
Use the Framework or Burn It
If your brand personality document is gathering dust in a shared drive, you have two options. Option one: activate it — build it into onboarding, into campaign briefings, into the daily editorial decisions that define how the brand actually sounds in the world. Option two: acknowledge that the 38 pages don’t reflect how the brand actually speaks, and do the harder work of figuring out what the brand genuinely is before you write it down again.
Both options require honesty. The worst option — which is also the most common — is to keep the document in the shared drive, reference it in meetings, and produce brand communications that bear no relationship to it whatsoever.
NoBriefs exists because creatives and marketers deserve tools that are honest about this stuff. If your brand needs a personality transplant more than a personality framework, start here. We’re warm yet authoritative, innovative yet grounded, and absolutely none of that was written by committee.
