Influx

Most brand characters begin as solutions to advertising problems. Marketers use the characters to emphasize and re-emphasize the intended positioning and to suppress or ‘position against’ brand or product weaknesses, conflicts and vulnerabilities.

But an interesting insight from this year’s Influx M-squared conference came from Brian Lanahan, principal at Portland firm, Character. He said that when marketers create purely positive, upbeat, rosy characters, they don’t ring true, don’t connect with the consumer and are ultimately kind of boring. Just like in novels, movies and TV shows, unless there is some kind of struggle, there is no hook to compel us to watch a story through to a resolution. As it turns out, brand characters with conflicts and struggles are likewise far more engaging, more interesting to watch, and ultimately more effective at getting a brand positioning across.

But marketers usually don’t want their brand to appear flawed or vulnerable and the simplified characters they create mirror that ideal. The lesson here is that a brand’s weaknesses, flaws and especially conflicts are gold. They give personality and dimension to a brand character, and to the brand, itself. When we say conflict, we don’t mean fighting, we mean struggle: between two aspects of a character, between the character and his environment, or between the character and another character. These human struggles are windows through which the audience can identify and come to care about a character.

The M&M’s characters are a perfect case study demonstrating the potential value of this insight to a brand. Up through the ’80′s, the M&M characters were cheery and japanime cute, cooing the brand positioning and smiling. Then in the ’90′s each M&M character was given a distinct personality, complete with backstory and conflicts. At the center of these conflicts is usually the dilemma that people always want to eat them. Each character has a different way of dealing with the dilemma: the orange crispy M&M feels powerless, gets anxious and whines, the red M&M overcompensates and tries to act confident, the yellow M&M is a little slow and gets mocked by the red one. The brand benefit that they are delicious candy covered chocolates is intrinsic to their conflicts, but it really gets through to people because the brand benefit isn’t the be-all and end-all focus of the characters’ being. It’s a premise underlying the personalities and situations of real, flawed characters. These revamped characters generated a $250 million sales increase in their first two years.

Left-click to stream or right-click to download the audio of Brian Lanahan’s closing remarks from this year’s M2 Conference or read his entire presentation here.

Note: Influx will host the 2nd M2 marketing conference on September 27th, 2005 in San Francisco. To be included on the mailing list for information on the event, please send your email to ed1@influxinsights.com and make sure to mark it M2