Bringing out the characters in your business
“Let’s step into character” - Jules, Pulp Fiction
Let’s start with a bit of drama. I can tell you a bit of behind the scenes, as someone who enjoys writing, that there’s disagreement with this ‘personality in writing’ stuff. Some don’t like it.
Others do.
And there are various reasons, I suppose. But at the end of the day, the question is…
Should we bring out ‘character’ in business?
I’m obviously biased towards character and personality in business, so we can’t trust my answer. So here’s another question:
Where does your relationship with a business or creator lie?
If the relationship you have with the business lies in the information, character is less important. Getting your drivers licence renewed, et cetera. Something we have to do. But if the relationship lies in something deeper, such as brand, how the product or information makes you feel, well, then we need to look at character.
If you’re in a service, hospitality or even product business, you hopefully point to the latter.
And, well, if you think it’s just about information or product, then you probably aren’t reading any of my stuff anyway, because you wouldn’t believe in a storified view of the world.
So if there’s something in ‘brand’, and how a business makes you feel through what it does, then the question is, what really drives the brand?
Some will say the colours or the logos. And even the font.
But those are just signals of something deeper.
But if we look deeper, will see that it’s the story.
The colours, logos, and fonts simply try to represent the story. This is why you see so many businesses that get a brand ‘package’ start to freeze after a while. Because it’s deeper than that.
What drives the story?
“Structure and character are interlocked. The event structure of a story is created out of the choices that characters make under pressure and the actions they choose to take, while characters are the creatures who are revealed and changed by how they choose to act under pressure. If you change one, you change the other.” - Robert McKee
While we often ‘think’ it’s the coffee that we go back for, it’s usually how going to the cafe, or buying the beans makes us feel.
The deeper root of that brand, ain’t just the coffee beans, but the people, what they do, and our relationship with them.
What about boring companies?
When I was younger, I worked as an engineer for Boeing. It was my second to last corporate job, and at this point the pain had already set in, even though I didn’t have any kind of direction on what was next.
Anyway, this was the most ‘straight’ job you could have. Wear a certain uniform. Sit along a long row of desks. And when you go outside, because it was on an Air Force base, you had to walk between the painted lines. No photos et cetera.
Very strict.
But, every few days in the office, it was someone’s birthday. And when that happened they had to bring in a cake.
When the cake came out, people let loose.
Crass jokes, watercooler stories and unmentionables that aren’t a fit for an article.
When I think back to that time, I remember the work, but mostly, I remember the people. I can still see their face and what they stood for, because they were the characters in the story. And in a sense, the people were the brand.
Is it just me?
The other night I spoke with a group of cleaning businesses. I asked them in the chat who their favourite character was from any film or TV.
Cruella, The Joker, a few others popped up.
A whole bunch of people put Beth Dutton from Yellowstone.
They liked how she was flawed. And basically said that she made the whole series.
I gave an example of one of the cleaning companies that I had seen online. In a few seconds, I could give ten different points about this person’s character, her struggles, her values, her backstory, and what she stood for.
The people in the chat agreed.
And the business I spoke about does particularly well.
Sometimes there are instances where a business has such a huge, pre-existing brand that there’s no need for any compelling characters. These companies have customer service procedures, outsourced call centres, or chat bots.
These are not only the exception rather than the rule, but they ain’t typically the kinds of businesses you and I want to build. Plus, even a lot of these businesses are shifting.
In service businesses, brand is less about following the guidelines and the filters on the photos. It’s whether or not the characters in the world act in alignment with core values, and have a personality we can relate to.
When we look at a thriving service (and often, hospitality) business, we usually see a compelling character or team driving the mission forward. We have a strong relationship with all of that.
And there are a lot of factors, but when you look at a struggling business, you will often see a lack of a compelling character driving the mission forward. It can feel like a vacuum, or ‘flat.’
How do we bring out the character?
A lot of brand people will tell us that we need to be known, liked and trusted. While I think this is true, I find this slogan can lead to a flat character that is trying too hard to be ‘likeable’. Meaning, we strip away quirks, conflict or struggle, which deletes any hope of an interesting story or relationship.
Another way to look at it is to be ‘connected and respected.’
Respected for our skillset or service, and connected through our humanity.
Connection still requires trust. But this flip can get us thinking about how to bring out a real person with depth, rather that just a photo that could easily be a stock image.
At the risk of going too far here for the purposes of business, another thing we can think about is the concept of struggle, or pressure. When we think about Beth Dutton, her character is routinely exposed to deeper and deeper levels of pressure or struggle. Our relationship with her character deepens not because of her hair or accent. But because we see how she acts in these times of struggle.
So in a sense, we bring out the character by showing how the character does what they do, particularly when they’re under pressure. We have a story, and brand.
This gets back to what McKee was talking about earlier. The character and structure (or mission of your business) are interlinked.
When the character never has struggle, we end up focusing too much on ‘characterisation’, and not character. We get caught up in what they look like, or how they dress. Because there’s nothing else to grab on to. This creates a flat character.
In a sense, in the world of ‘personal brand’, bringing out the obstacles we face and the struggles we have overcome can be one of the strongest things we can do.
OK, enough theory. Let’s look at a few practical examples of how you can do this.
Example One
A little risk of being self-centred here. But if you’ve gotten to this point, you’ve put up with the crotchety emails of yours truly for a while. Or maybe you just landed here by accident. I don’t know. But either way, the final check I have with any writing, is to make sure there’s personality in it.
Like a ‘fact check’ but a ‘personality check.’
I’m so far on the other side of the whole AI thing, because it’s never my goal to be a reductionist that distills things down to the minimum, because that’s not how things are communicated. Nobody remembers what they read in the Encyclopaedia Britanica. To me, personality is a sign of health, and is really part of how we interact with each other.
Even in these articles, you already know where I worked, people I’ve worked with, views and opinions, et cetera.
So that’s your first option, is to learn to write with personality in your newsletter. Tell stories et cetera.
Example Two:
Valkyrie Gym about page. Hugo and team do a great job on social media with character, but for some people, social media can be a little much to start. In those cases, I suggest starting with the about page. At least give us a little humanity around the people that we’re going to be working with when we come in, right?
Anyway, on the about page, see how they have given some weaknesses, strengths, et cetera. Not only that, but with the GIF you get a little more context of how they move and what they do. They are loaded with personality.
Now this could be a bit strong for a lot of businesses. But you can pare it down. Either way, there’s a sense of a team, and they haven’t only focused on the qualifications and how ‘perfect’ the characters are, as if it’s some random LinkedIN post.
On social media, they also do a great job of bringing out the character of their clients as well. We’ll go more into customer success stories another time.
Example Three:
LORDS coffee is around the corner from me, and is a family owned and operated biz-ness headed up my friend Brownie AKA Mullet Lord and his wife Nicola.
This is probably worth a much bigger case study, because what we really see is a business story that originally kicked off from Brownie’s backstory overcoming some big struggles in life (You can listen here), and then valuing freedom and self expression.
So when you land on the site this is the ‘feeling’ that you get, and reflects the brand well.
Anyway, the cool thing that they do is story driven content on social media. And by that I mean literal short stories.
Ultimately, when you can tell a real story, you bring out the character at a deeper level, without having to tell us anything about them. Instead, it is shown in how they do what they do.
This is effective, but can be a big task if you’re starting out.
(Start by ‘wrapping’ regular content with a little bit of character, see the positive feedback, and ease into it that way.)
Summary
There’s a cliched line in marketing and business coaching that people do business with people. Problem with that is it isn’t too instructional.
When we look at what makes a compelling character in any story, we can see simple ways to do this in our businesses.
This doesn’t mean the business is ‘about us’. The service is priority, the change we make is key. However it does mean we can’t afford to have a flat business that is impossible to relate to.
For some businesses, this might go to level ten.
For others, it can be simply bringing out enough character for people to understand who you are, and how you do what you do.
We live in a world where quality of service is a prerequisite, but character and personality is a requirement.