As an agency who believes real is beautiful, we look for inspiration in an obvious place: the real world. And for today's post, we look to common clichés of advertising and branding to find our topic: personifying the brand. Marketers often use terms like “brand personality” and “brand behavior,” or ask “what does the brand stand for,” as if the brand is a real, living person. So we are taking this metaphorical bridge from people to brands a step further by profiling real, living, breathing—but especially likable—people to see what we might learn. All brands want to be liked, right?

We started by asking ourselves, what are the attributes of a likable person? Then we mapped those attributes to the act of branding. A very subjective exercise, to be sure, but we think the parallels we’ve found are useful for all brand marketers.

This exercise in likability has inspired us at North to consider these attributes as guidelines for the brands we work with, to remind ourselves that when it comes to making brands interesting, we only need to look at people. 

Real ones.