The following is a guest piece written by Julie Reeves, a vice president analyst in the Gartner Marketing practice. Opinions are the author’s own.
When Callaway Golf recently faced criticism over a social media campaign created with golf brand Good Good Golf, much of the discussion centered on creative judgment and approval processes. Marketers asked a familiar question: How did this get approved?
A more useful question is whether the brand had clear personality guardrails in place to identify potential issues before the campaign reached the market. The underlying strategy may have been sound, but that does not necessarily mean the execution reflected the character customers associate with the brand. In many cases, creative failures are not positioning failures. They are personality failures.
As marketers refresh brands for a changing marketplace, much of the emphasis remains on purpose, positioning and messaging. Personality often receives less attention. Organizations routinely invest substantial effort in defining their target audiences, value propositions and competitive differentiation. Personality, meanwhile, is frequently reduced to a handful of adjectives in a brand book before being largely ignored during decision making. That approach overlooks the role personality plays in helping brands evaluate content, partnerships and customer experiences.
Positioning doesn't answer every question
Positioning remains foundational to a successful brand strategy. It helps organizations communicate their value, differentiate from competitors and establish relevance with customers. But positioning alone rarely provides enough guidance for the decisions marketers face every day.
For example, a social media post may communicate the intended underlying strategic message but do so in a way that creates friction with customer expectations about how that brand is supposed to behave and the values it espouses.
Personality influences tone, behavior, creative expression and participation in culture. It helps marketers move beyond asking whether an idea communicates the right message and is “on strategy” and consider whether it reflects the expectations of the brand's character. That distinction becomes particularly important when brands take creative risks or participate in cultural conversations where intuition alone is rarely a reliable guide.
The most important role of personality is governance
While many organizations view personality primarily as a tool for shaping tone of voice or creative style, it's more important role is governance. A clearly defined and formalized brand personality provides objective criteria for evaluating creative and messaging decisions, reducing reliance on subjective judgment and internal hierarchy.
A strong brand personality creates a shared language for decision making. Internal teams, agency partners and other stakeholders can evaluate ideas against a common standard rather than debating individual tastes. That consistency becomes especially valuable when organizations are intentionally pushing boundaries or exploring unconventional creative territory.
Content scale raises the stakes
The need for stronger personality guardrails becomes more pronounced as marketing organizations create content at greater volume across a growing number of channels and touchpoints.
Generative artificial intelligence has accelerated content production, making it possible for teams to develop more concepts, more variations and more assets in less time. Messaging frameworks and visual identity standards remain important, but they do not always provide clear answers in situations where marketers are evaluating tone, behavior or creative expression.
As content volumes increase, maintaining consistency becomes less about reviewing every asset individually and more about establishing principles that guide decisions across teams, agencies and AI-assisted workflows. Personality serves as an important filter, helping marketers determine what is truly on brand before content reaches customers.
Gartner research found that 82% of business leaders believe their company's identity, including its brand, will need to change significantly to keep pace with AI's impact on markets. As organizations revisit their brand strategies, many will focus on positioning. They should give equal attention to personality.
Brands are ultimately judged by how they show up. Customers form impressions through advertising, social media, partnerships, service experiences and countless other interactions. When those experiences consistently reflect a recognizable personality, brands are better equipped to build trust and maintain relevance. When they do not, even strategically sound executions can feel out of character.
For marketers navigating an increasingly complex content environment, personality should no longer be treated as a secondary element of brand strategy. It is one of the mechanisms that helps keep execution aligned with the brand customers expect to experience and marketers intend to express.
