If you also cringed at Callaway Golf’s recent social media fail, today’s insight is for you. 😬
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💡 Today’s Insight 💡
🗞 TL;DR - A few weeks ago, Callaway Golf faced criticism over a social media campaign created with golf brand Good Good Golf. You might have seen it and cringed. And, if you’re like us, you might have wondered: how did something this glaringly problematic get approved? Gartner VP Analyst Julie Reeves argues that a more useful question is whether the brand had clear personality guardrails in place to identify issues before the campaign went live.
💡 Insight - The most important thing this flop reminds us is that brand personality matters more than ever. Marketers have been refreshing brands at a record pace, but often fail to define their brand’s personality. Alternatively, brands reduce personality to a handful of adjectives in a brand book that’s often overlooked in decision making.
Reeves explains that, while brand positioning is foundational to a successful strategy, it simply defines what a brand stands for and how it wins. Brand personality defines how the brand shows up.
Brand personality can best be understood as “describe your brand as if it were a person.” How would they behave? How would customers recognize them? Does this personality reinforce or undermine how you show up in the market?
The most important role of personality is governance. A clearly defined and formalized brand personality provides objective criteria for evaluating creative and messaging decisions, reducing subjective judgment and internal hierarchy.
Maybe Callaway Golf and Good Good Golf have their brand personalities defined. But with how quickly they backpedaled their problematic campaign, one can pretty easily guess that the definitions either don’t exist, weren’t regarded, or are problematic. Which do you think it is?
