You Don’t Have to be BRAT, but You Do Need Real Personality

3 Steps to Give Your Brand Genuine Attitude

By Jane McCarthy

BRAT summer may be over, but the culture’s fascination with creators that have real attitude is only growing. The same goes for brands. Brands that amplify their authentic personality through their actions, products, experiences, collabs and content are attractive right now because they give people points of emotional connection that reach deeper than the surface stimulus that is streaming past them moment-by-moment.

People want to be inspired, and they want to feel they’re in connection with real humanness rather than glossy AI-generation. As a brand, the way to give your community what they’re thirsting for is to be who you authentically are, with the volume turned up. Turn up the volume on your genuine personality, so you stand out in the field as a beacon people can really relate with.

Here are 3 steps to getting there:

#1 Clarify Your Archetype: Archetypes are universal energetic forces that speak to the very fabric of the human experience. When you align your brand with an archetypal character, you connect to a world of symbol and story that has deep power in the collective and will help you forge an emotional bond with the people you most want to resonate with.

Marketers classically use Carl Jung’s set of 12 archetypes to determine their brand’s character. For building rich and authentic feminine brands, I like to use a set of 8 goddess archetypes. Whatever system you utilize, getting clear on who your brand is through an archetypal lens ensures you’re working with fertile clay that can yield creative ideas people find compelling.

An ideal archetype for your brand is going to hit the sweet spot where who you are as a company meets the kind of experience your customers are wanting to have. You are then credibly delivering an experience your community actually desires.

An ultra-clear example of a brand who does this impeccably is Tesla. Tesla’s archetype is the Innovator. The Innovator character is baked into its name, which conjures the wildly hard-driving, no-holds-barred, open-minded discovery energy of the 19th century inventor Nikola Tesla. Crucially, the brand lives up to its bold moniker. Drivers who are behind the wheel of a Tesla, or encountering the brand in any way, can feel sure they are at the forefront of innovation and are experiencing the most future-forward drive on the road. For a Tesla customer, that’s a very meaningful experience.

#2 Uncover Your Attitude: Once you clarify your core archetype, you can expand on it by outlining the related personality traits you want to embody as a brand. These traits set a mood and a vibe for how you’ll express yourself in the world. They shape your attitude and outlook, as well as the cultural milieu you’re playing in. Developing a brand attitude that is distinct in your category can be hugely impactful in helping you break through.

A fantastic example of the power of a breakthrough attitude is the body care brand Megababe. Megababe takes on body care issues like hemorrhoids that were previously the purview of medical-feeling brands like Preparation H, bringing a bright, sweet and totally unabashed energy to the occasion.

Megababe, led by founder Katie Sturino, manages to make thigh-chafing feel fun and Butt Stuff inspiring. Giving these normally ‘out of sight’ body issues the magical rainbow treatment is mega-differentiated in the market and makes Megababe mega-magnetic to its community. It’s an attitude very much aligned with another hit brand Starface, which approaches pimples with confidence and cuteness. For these brands, attitude is everything and their attitude is resonating.

#3 Create & Collaborate: After defining the archetypal character and attitude of your brand, the next step is to bring this energy into what you’re creating, from your products and services to your design, your content and your IRL events. A fantastic way to amplify your presence is to collaborate with creators and brands who play in a similar archetypal space as you do. Where personalities align, creative fusion can lead to new, innovative places and help you reach new segments of people.

The idea is to show more than tell, and play the edge of your attitude in your creations. Be supremely sweet or supremely offbeat. Be extremely maximal or extremely minimal. Whatever you do, avoid middle-of-the-road vanilla.

The recent brand refresh by Figma illustrates this concept beautifully. Figma’s updated color palette and shape-led visual language is vibrant, playful and intended to be inviting to a more expansive realm of people, beyond the original users who were primarily designers. The imaginative kaleidoscope vibe of the evolved Figma brand is bursting with personality and feels a little child-like. Figma conjures an elementary-school-art-class energy, building with kids scissors, bright construction paper, and a bunch of markers. The feeling of real-life making is woven into the tapestry of the brand now in a way that is so differentiated from other SAAS brands like Adobe and Microsoft.

People want brands with personality because they are craving the real and the human. In the increasingly technological age, our humanness is the antidote and people feel that. Let your humanness shine through, maximally.

About the Author

Jane McCarthy is a brand strategist and author of The Goddess Guide to Branding. To discover your goddess archetype at work, take the free quiz.