Photo by Elke Vogelsang
During the dev stages of the plugin Justin and I talked about what our brand personality should be.
Specifically, about how excited we were to able to add some to this project in a deliberate way from the get go.
I have always wanted to do this.
On my first few endeavors I didn’t know any better.
Since then I have been working on others projects and have not had the creative license to take it anywhere near where I wanted to.
First, lets get some context.
Brand Personality
Lets define it.
Brand personality is a set characteristics that define the identity of a startup and how you want people to view you. As in other words, it’s the reason why people like your company — JAY DENG
Read Jay’s piece for some proper context and better background. He has some good examples in there as well.
Let me add to his list by showing some of my all time favs.
Great Examples
Lets take a look at a few different examples of great brand personality. Again, its the reason why people like your company and hopefully share it.
CD Baby
If you have not heard of Derek Sivers, I highly recommend you checkout his blog, dude is a genius.
He is also credited with perhaps the greatest customer service email of all time with a company called CD Baby.
“Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow. A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing.
Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.
We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved “Bon Voyage!” to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Friday, June 6th.
I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as “Customer of the Year”. We’re all exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!”
The email was shared thousands of times, blogged about, generated thousands of new customers, and is an epic display of personality.
The Most Interesting Man in the World
What about this guy?
The most interesting man in the world on rollerblading. “Nope”
I love that guy so much he is my default avatar on my social accounts. Everybody can recite one of his quotes. They are never about the actual beer either.
Tunnel Bear
During the course of writing this post, and being distracted, I decided to unsusbscribe from an email, found another great example.
I love this example especially as its taking a shot at brand personality on the way out. I have just unsubscribed from their emails, I am gone at this point. Yet they take a shot with a funny unsub page and now I am sharing their product in this post.
Whats the point?
Perhaps simplifying things greatly…
To get people to talk about your brand and get them to share it with their friends.
There is no better referral than person to person recommendations. They are better than paid traffic, organic traffic, posts written about you, getting mentioned on a podcast, etc.
Thats the conventional wisdom anyway and I certainly believe it personally.
Its a really hard thing to track though.
No GA report is gonna tell you about a conversation among friends over cold beers.
If you can’t really measure it, then again, whats the point? Quoting from Jay again…
I don’t need to tell you how competitive the startup industry is. Your best chances of survival might not end up being your product or price point, but your brand personality. So start making people laugh and cry. Entertain them. Arouse emotions. Measure happiness as the number one metric. Find your spark.
Ok then, lets give that a shot.
The good news is that is there are some cools ways to do this with our plugin.
Brand personality using story|ftw
If you are publishing / marketing at all then I would image you have some confirmations pages on your site.
Perhaps they are attached to email optins, or form fill outs, e-commerce transactions, etc.
So you have some options. You can use the boring thanks for filling the form out technique.
Or, you can attempt make people laugh.
Here is how we have started doing that with our plugin.
story|ftw confirmations pages
- Homepage Email Opt-in — your the man now dawg
- Contact Confirmed — still love the office
- Feature Request Confirmed — you gota gift you
- Email Signup Confirmed — who does not love it when dogs get all fired up for a walk?
We love gif’s and think using them on confirmation pages with the story|ftw plugin is a great way to add some brand personality to your site.
How many hilarious gif’s are out there? Lots. Use this search engine, find one that is on brand for you, throw it in a story page with a line of text or two , and you are in business.
While no where near as funny as the CD baby letter, or The Most Interesting Man the World, we do think its a step in the right direction and certainly a lot more fun then your standard confirmation page.