The personality of a brand

Last month was our turn to host the latest G7 event, a networking forum for the property, design and construction sectors. At each event, the hosts give a short presentation about an industry topic to encourage some lively debate, over a glass (or several) of wine.

We chose leading real estate company CBRE’s headquarters in Henrietta Street for the event. Not only is it a great entertaining space but it was also the perfect way for us to show off the interior environment work, including wayfinding, wall and window graphics and experiential digital graphics, we had created for its offices...which leads us nicely onto the topic of our presentation.

Taking a tongue-in-cheek look at brand personality - what it is, the importance of carrying it across all touchpoints, including the office environment and how we’ve done just that for clients - we challenged guests to a game of celebrity ‘Guess Who’. Based on a list of personality attributes, such as ‘impeccably dressed, stylish and proud to be British’ for one and ‘thought provoking, contemporary cool and quirky’ for another, we asked guests to guess the four personalities.

To show how we have bought personality to our clients’ environments/interiors, we then linked each personality and their attributes to one of our clients, with CBRE as James Bond going down very well with COO Martin Lewis.

We used Dawn French, whose attributes included ‘cheeky, light-hearted and energetic’ to represent Newsprinters, whilst Brian Cox was perfect to showcase the creativity we’d brought to The Francis Crick Institute, as he’s ‘approachable, young’ and ‘making science fun.’ Finally, Damien Hirst was ‘thought provoking, cool and quirky’ to reflect the work we did for Yahoo!’s Swiss headquarters.

Although intentionally light hearted, we did have a serious message behind our talk, in that design does have a major impact on people’s experience of an environment, the perception that it gives and the impression it can create.

See our presentation here and if you need any help expressing your brand personality or with your workplace environments, do let us know.