When Callaway Golf faced criticism over a social campaign created with Good Good Golf, marketers asked the familiar question: how did this get approved? In a Marketing Dive guest column, Gartner VP analyst Julie Reeves suggests a more useful one: did the brand have clear brand personality guardrails that could have flagged the problem before launch?
The strategy may have been sound, but that doesn’t mean the execution reflected the character customers associate with the brand. In many cases, Reeves argues, creative failures aren’t positioning failures — they’re personality failures.
Positioning defines what a brand stands for and how it wins. Personality defines how it shows up. Companies pour effort into audiences, value propositions and differentiation, while personality often shrinks to a few adjectives in a brand book that get ignored in decisions.
Personality is typically expressed as five or fewer adjectives describing the brand as a person. That can sound like a nice-to-have, but it answers questions positioning can’t:
A social post can carry the right strategic message yet clash with what customers expect of the brand’s behavior and values — especially when brands take creative risks or join cultural conversations where intuition is an unreliable guide.
Reeves stresses that personality isn’t just a tone-of-voice tool. A clearly defined, formalized personality provides objective criteria for evaluating creative and messaging, reducing reliance on subjective judgment and internal hierarchy. Internal teams, agencies and stakeholders can judge ideas against a shared standard rather than debating personal taste — which matters most when a brand intentionally pushes boundaries.
Generative AI lets teams produce more concepts, variations and assets in less time. Messaging frameworks and visual standards still matter, but they rarely settle questions of tone, behavior or expression. As volume grows, consistency depends less on reviewing every asset and more on principles that guide teams, agencies and AI-assisted workflows. Gartner research found 82% of business leaders believe their company’s identity, including its brand, must change significantly to keep pace with AI’s impact on markets.
To use personality as governance, turn adjectives into behavioral rules. If your brand is “playful,” document which jokes it makes and which it doesn’t, with examples and counter-examples. Then feed those rules into agency briefs and AI prompts so consistency holds as output scales — the approach behind marketers who lock their brand voice into a reusable skill. With platforms building antibodies against AI slop, a recognizable personality is also part of what makes content survive.
Positioning defines what a brand stands for and how it wins; personality defines how it behaves and shows up. Together they provide strategic direction and behavioral guidance.
Usually with five or fewer adjectives describing the brand as a person, turned into practical rules with examples of what fits and what doesn’t.
Generative AI multiplies content volume, making asset-by-asset review impractical. Personality becomes a shared standard for teams, agencies and AI workflows.
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