Product truths are often easy to write and hard to dramatise. Multitasking. Expertise. Nourishment. Transformative power. Renewable energy. A reason to groom somewhere awkward. Personification gives those truths agency.
Unlike Celebrity Metaphors, the meaning does not primarily come from somebody famous, nor does it depend on a fictional character arriving with decades of pre-loaded cultural meaning. The strongest examples for this tactic build the character from the product truth itself. The character looks like it, behaves like it, performs it or exists because of it. Here are six ways to do just that.
- Turn the product into a person
- Turn the product property into a character
- Personify the product benefit
- Make the product perform its truth
- Personify the product need
- Personify the brand expertise
1. Turn the Product Into a Person
Imagine the product itself as a character, then build its personality from the role it plays.
Cointreau Changes Everything — Cointreau · TBWA\Paris · 2022
Cointreau is an ingredient whose job is transformation: add it to a cocktail and something ordinary becomes more interesting. TBWA turned that role into a person. The campaign introduced Cointreau as an elegant character who moves through situations, changing their energy as naturally as the liqueur changes a drink. The character isn't an arbitrary spokesperson wearing the brand colours. His personality comes directly from what Cointreau is supposed to do. The product's role in the glass becomes the character's role in the story.
The useful question is simple: if our product walked into the room, what kind of person would it be?
2. Turn the Product Property Into a Character
Give a natural, functional or technical property a body that behaves exactly like the property.
The Power of Wind — Epuron · Nordpol Hamburg · 2007
Wind is difficult to sell because you cannot see it. Nordpol's answer was Mr Wind, a lonely man whose entire personality is constructed from what wind actually does. He blows people's newspapers away, disturbs picnics, lifts skirts and makes himself generally unwelcome. Then he discovers a place where those same characteristics become valuable: producing renewable energy. The campaign does not put a mascot next to the proposition. Mr Wind is the proposition. His troublesome behaviour becomes the physical proof of the force Epuron can harness.
