Brand Character
A brand's character is not the adjective chosen in a workshop. It's the predictable way the company reacts when something goes wrong in front of a customer.
“A brand's real character shows in the apology email after an outage, not in the product launch ad claim.”
Otto GTM ObservatoryWhy it shows in difficult moments
Anyone can write a brilliant product launch communication. A brand's real character emerges when something goes wrong: downtime, a billing error, a delivery delay. How the company communicates in those moments, with transparency or evasiveness, with accountability or excuses, defines perceived character far more than any planned campaign.
This means brand character must be translated into behavioral guidelines shared with customer success and support, the teams that handle real friction moments with the customer, not just whoever writes marketing content.
Anti-patterns
Common mistake: defining brand character only for planned marketing communication, letting customer success and support communicate in crisis situations without guidelines consistent with that character.
Second mistake: choosing an aspirational brand character (e.g. 'bold and direct') without verifying whether it matches how the organization actually behaves in difficult moments, creating a dissonance the customer perceives as inconsistency.
Practical Application
During a 6-hour service outage, a company communicates with total transparency (technical cause, timeline, automatic compensation) instead of the standard generic notice. Customer sentiment measured over the following 30 days turns out more positive than the pre-incident period, and the renewal rate of contracts expiring in that period shows no negative impact.