Excellent thoughts here on cultivating personality in your products. Note that just about everything can be thought of as a product. If you produce reports for a living, the report is your product. You can create a brand out of that report. If you paint houses for a living, your product is someone’s painted house. The house itself is hard to brand, since you probably don’t have a lot of creative leeway, but you’re not. Your trucks aren’t. Your tools aren’t. Everything you use can be infused with the personality of your choosing.
How?
Well, it depends on what sort of personality you’re shooting for. Pick a successful product or company with a personality you want to emulate, and break down how they do it.
Google should be the most boring company on the planet. 99% of their money is made on returning search results. But, they even manage to inject some fun into that process. When you think of Google, you think of a nerdy, quirky, smart, and maybe fun company. They doodle. They provide a ton of fun, free products. Their products have easter eggs. Everyone wants to work there, not only for the free food. Google has devoted itself to a culture of science and progress and fun, and this permeates everything they do.
Take a company like Zappos or Nordstrom, who are obsessed with customer satisfaction. Whether it’s getting help ordering late-night pizzas or returning tire chains, these companies are known for relentlessly working to make their customers happy. These individual stories come at the expense of the bottom line, but any lost profits are made up with subsequent sales and with an enormous boost in goodwill. Maintaining this personality takes a ton of work though; hiring the right people, training them, and constantly reminding them of what the company stands for. Zappos even prints their core values on their shipping boxes.
Or, as Giant Robot Dinosaur says:
HAVE PERSONALITY EASY. ANSWER THREE QUESTIONS:
1. HOW YOU CHANGE CUSTOMER’S LIFE?
2. WHAT YOU STAND FOR?
3. WHO OR WHAT YOU HATE?
NOW HAVE MISSION, VALUES, ENEMY. THAT ENOUGH FOR MINIMUM VIABLE PERSONALITY.
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