What is the value of personality to your brand? Just ask Einstein!

Personality is an incredibly effective marketing tool.

In many ways, we already know this. Brands spend BIG on commercials that show emotional connection. It’s personalities that anchor it, embodying friendliness, camaraderie, humor and likeability. Whether it’s people, animals or animations, these personalities make us laugh, smile or feel warmth and empathy.

You don’t need to be Don Draper to know how powerful those connections can be. Emotional content creates more successful advertising campaigns than rational content, according to USC. How “likeable” the personalities are remains the best measure for whether an ad will lead to increased brand sales.

So why does that personality – that emotional connection – disappear immediately and cease to exist throughout the rest of the marketing funnel?

Well, it’s been desperately hard to maintain the excitement, enjoyment and engagement of a great commercial throughout the marketing journey.

LiMu Emu and Doug may make you smile, laugh and engage with Liberty Mutual’s brand, but the duo aren’t going to be available to help you find the best insurance policy for your new home.

What if they did?

What if Doug used his crazily extensive insurance knowledge to actually help you find and apply for insurance on the website or app, while keeping you entertained along the way? What if you had ongoing questions about your policy, and he was always on hand to teach you?

That’s been the promise of conversational AI and digital humans for a couple of years – but we’re now beginning to see the impact of those personalities on consumers, brands and the entire marketing journey.

Personality-activated marketing by the numbers

When we launched Digital Einstein back in April 2021, our intention was to give a new generation a chance to engage with the Nobel Prize winner. With the help of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Greenlight Rights, Digital Einstein is a way to teach people about the great man’s life and works.

But he also had an effect on our marketing performance, too – from the top right through to the bottom of the funnel.

Digital Einstein – much like the real thing – is a genius. Only this version proved to be a genius at bringing more traffic, contacts and leads to our brand than ever before. To be honest, more than we expected.

We’ve packaged our findings up into our new marketers’ guide, which you can access for free below.

Beyond Einstein: Injecting personality into YOUR brand

Could we have used a different ambassador? Absolutely. Could we have done this without having a strong, interactive personality at front and center of our campaign? Absolutely not.

Not everyone can, will or should launch their own genius physicist to have conversations with their customers. But they don’t necessarily have to.

Brands around the world have their own corporate mascots, influencers, brand ambassadors and even execs who are excellent personalities. They’re also ready-made to integrate into the marketing journey. Even smaller brands have their founders, CEOs and other people who are great personas for interactive marketing experiences. They make very modern influencers.

There’s a reason Elon Musk has almost six-times the Twitter followers Tesla has, after all. It’s the power of personality.  A person can connect on an emotional level so much more naturally than a faceless brand can

Combining personality with technology

A digital human embodies a brand’s personality and gives customer access around the clock, to thousands of users at once. And it’s becoming more obvious that innovative marketing teams can combine these automated, convenient conversational AI platforms with their unique and engaging brand personalities.

The goal is to create more inspiring conversational marketing moments – at any point in the marketing funnel.

There’s now no reason to let engagement stop at the top of your funnel. And you don’t have to let two-way human interaction exist only at the very bottom with your direct sales teams.

Check out our new guide on using personality as a marketing fundamental below. We’d love to hear your thoughts.

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