Your Brand Has a Great Personality

In this case, saying “you have a great personality” is a good thing. Why? Because people don’t connect with brands because they follow a branding process™. No one falls in love with your award-winning framework, pixel-perfect layout, or round six of stakeholder-approved messaging.

They connect because your brand made them feel something. Because it had a voice. A vibe. A personality. But somehow, branding has become obsessed with systems, steps, and sterile strategy decks. Like if you trademark the right 5-step process, you can finally capture that “magic” and bottle it. Let me save you some time: you can’t.

Branding Isn’t a Flowchart

Yes, process matters. But when your entire brand is built on guidelines and grid systems, don’t be surprised when it ends up polished but lifeless. Because branding isn’t a formula. It’s a feeling. It’s the song people hum, not the notes on the page. It’s the thing they remember when they forget everything else.

Some brands need one bold idea. Others need a full blown intervention and a long walk in the woods. There’s no one size fits all solution. And the more you try to control it, the more generic it becomes.

The Process Trap

“Do you have a process?”

Of course. But here’s the real question: do you want a process, or do you want a soul?

Too many organizations chase control under the guise of strategy. They want something fresh but only if it looks like everything else in their industry. They ask for innovation while clinging to templates. They want to stand out but insist on checking all the same boxes.

It’s a recipe for sameness.

Industry Experience Is Overrated

One of the fastest ways to kill originality? Only hiring people who’ve worked in your industry.

Some of the best brand insights come from outside the echo chamber. A hospital can learn more from a hotel or a sneaker brand than from another health system obsessed with awards and accreditations. A fresh perspective doesn’t mean chaos. It means breaking patterns. And if your industry is stuck in the mud, maybe it’s time to stop looking sideways and start looking forward.

If You Don’t Stand for Something, You Default to Boring

Here’s the thing: in the absence of personality, you’ll fall back on facts.

“We’ve been serving the community since 1973.”

Cool. So has your local post office. Facts don’t create connection. Personality does. Voice does. A clear sense of who you are does. If your brand can’t answer that without sounding like a committee wrote it, you’ve got work to do. Ask harder questions. Dig past the surface. Quit trying to say everything and start saying the right thing. Loudly.

So What Now?

Drop the noise, the stats, the desperate need to feel official. People don’t care what you do every Tuesday at 2:30. (I like to grab my second coffee because I am likely brain-dead.) They care what you mean to them. Your brand isn’t a brochure. It’s a vibe. A perspective. And if it doesn’t have one, it’s just more noise in the feed.

Michael is the Creative Director and co-founder of FoxFuel Creative. He loves British music, vintage German cars, and American history, and his sarcasm knows no bounds. #DreamBig