Character > Message

Think of a person you love.

Make a quick mental list of the things you love about them. The way they talk. The way they act. The way they look. The way they tell stories. Their enthusiasm. Their quirks and imperfections.

What about their message? Do you love their message?

It’s a strange question because we don’t think about people that way. Prophets and pundits aside, people don’t have messages. And if I asked you to pick your loved one’s “Unique Selling Proposition,” what would you say? The question makes me uncomfortable, like when my wife asks “What do you like best about me?” Alarms go off. Trap! Trap! Change the subject.

Um…I like a lot of things about you.

Here’s the thing: you’re in a relationship with someone for lots of reasons. There’s no one thing that makes a person who they are or makes them likable (certainly not a message). So why, when we are so enamored with the idea of people having long-term, meaningful relationships with our brands, are we also obsessed with our messages? We bombard people with messages about how great we are. We write briefs with single net takeaways. We judge work based on whether or not it communicates the right information. And we obsess over whether a piece of communication fits well into the campaign.

We give lip service to building relationships, yet we cling to the old message-based mindset. We say we believe in conversations with our customers, but much of the way we work leads to us talking at them.

It’s not that we’ll never have something to say. A new, innovative product is news, worth talking about (maybe even announcing). But people don’t have relationships with messages. And while we’re obsessing about what we’re saying, we tend to give short shrift to what really matters in the long-term—our brand’s character.

What if, instead of focusing on what our brands are saying, we focused on who they are? What if, instead of a brief with a main message, we got a character description? A philosophy statement? A manifesto? What if, instead of spending countless hours figuring out what we need to say to make people like us, we figure out how to act like who we are?

When you consider a brand as a character, the way we currently do things can seem downright absurd.

Imagine a person you know saying the same thing to you, over and over and over.

Imagine that person having just one, single-minded interest.

Imagine that person talking about himself constantly.

Imagine you finding someone else to have a relationship with.

WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT ADVERTISING IN A FICTION CLASS
I regularly teach at Miami Ad School here in San Francisco. Sometimes I teach their storytelling class, which I run like a traditional fiction-writing workshop. We write a lot, dissect and analyze the writing of great authors, work on dialogue and sentence structure and concrete language and other things that help sharpen our tools.

When asked why creatives at an advertising school should take a fiction class, the easy answer is, “Because we are storytellers.” Advertising people like to say that because it sounds epic. But not only is it cliché, it’s not really true. Sure, we tell the occasional story in a 30-second TV spot or in longer-form digital content, but it’s not like we’re sitting around the fire preserving the history of our elders. And how many brands can honestly say they have a sustained, meaningful narrative? They may have a theme, but a theme is not a story.

We are not storytellers. We are character builders. In the big scheme of things, this is our great charge. Forget the theme. Forget the message. Forget the story for a moment. If you have a great character, all that other stuff will fall into place. And if you have a great character, people will want to have a relationship.

Let’s take this character thing a bit further. Let’s say we’re going to develop our brand character in the same way a fiction writer develops a character. What should we keep in mind?

First, it’s better to show than to tell. Rather than say that Mr. Potter is a real son-of-a bitch, have him kick a stray cat down the stairs. Translating this to the world of brands, we should be doing things, not just talking about things. Most self-aggrandizing TV spots are akin to a comedian walking onto stage and just talking about how funny he is. Don’t say it. Be it.

Second, and more importantly, figure out your character’s motivation. There’s a convention used in musicals, particularly Disney films, called the “I Wish” song. It’s usually the first song that the main character sings, and it lays out what they want in life. They literally specify their motivation (check out the first segment of this This American Life for more on the “I Wish” song). Why would they do this? Because the quickest way to understand a character is to understand not where they come from or what they’ve done but what they want.

None of the physical attributes of your character are important if you don’t understand your character’s motivation. In fact, a lot of great authors will talk about how, once they thoroughly understand their character, the plot takes care of itself. They just put the character into a situation and observe, almost as if they’re a journalist watching a scene.

So what is your brand’s motivation?

There’s a fantastic TED talk from Simon Sinek where he lays out why WHY is at the heart of any great brand or organization. In the same way that a fictional character with a well-defined motivation can guide the author’s narrative choices, a strongly defined WHY can guide a brand’s path. It can guide their decisions—everything from their actions to the products they develop to the ads they run to whether or not they choose to run ads in the first place (a well-defined character makes amazing things, like video responses via Twitter from a brand’s star spokesperson, possible). And having a well-defined WHY allows everyone in the organization to ask not if something is on-message, but a much more important question: is it on-character?

“People don’t buy what you do. They buy why you do it,” Sinek says. Put another way: People don’t fall in love with messages. They fall in love with characters.

Jim Bosiljevac is a Creative Director at DDB SF. He co-authors makinads.com, a blog for students and junior creatives, and curates the prestigious illustratedbycopywriters.com. Although he works in the West Bay, he proudly resides in Oakland and will gladly fight you.