If your company had a personality, what would it be?

Have you ever considered creating a personality for your company? Giving it human characteristics that consumers and business customers can more easily and meaningfully relate to?

Let’s boil this down to a simple consideration. If your company was a human being what type of personality would it possess?

It’s all part of the anthropomorphic techniques being increasingly used in advertising campaigns.

First a definition, since anyone can be excused for being unfamiliar with this obscure, rarely used term. To anthropomorphize is to “ascribe human form or attributes to (an animal, plant, material object, etc.).”

To give your company a personality is to give it human qualities that consumers and business customers can more easily and meaningfully relate to.

Let’s boil this down to a simple consideration. If your company was a human being what type of personality would it possess? What type of personality would you want it to possess?

>> Would it be an introvert or an extrovert?

>> Masculine or feminine?

>> Artistic or athletic?

>> Blunt or nuanced?

>> Formal or casual?

>> Cool or passionate?

>> Sexual or ascetic?

>> Ostentatious or understated?

It wouldn’t be an outlandish idea to hire a good fiction writer to develop that personality, to give it dimension, to fully express it.

Once you decide on a personality, how would your company manifest its personality?

Think about the personality Nike created for itself with its enduring Just Do It motto – a no-excuses attitude that suggests commitment and athletic excellence. The point was hammered home through the use of super-athlete endorsers ranging from Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan to Mia Hamm and Steve Prefontaine in the company’s early days. But many of its ads also featured ordinary people working out to stay physically fit in Nike gear.

Also consider Starbucks. Though Starbucks has fallen on leaner times these days it had an exceptional run of success by doing what many people might have thought impossible. It turned a cheap commodity, coffee, into a highly profitable designer beverage (which is very much what Nike did with athletic shoes).

Howard Schulz and Starbucks achieved incredible success by creating comfortable and esthetically pleasing coffeehouse environments where people wanted to hang out. Starbucks’ stores became miniature community centers and meeting places.  It also showed the world how coffee could be simultaneously customized and mass produced, two objectives that are typically mutually exclusive.

The CEO is sometimes the embodiment of a company’s personality.

Think about how closely tied Apple is to the personality of co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs. Ditto for George Zimmer, founder and CEO of Men’s Wearhouse. Another example is Herb Kelleher, the flamboyant bourbon-drinking founder and former CEO of Southwest Airlines.

There is a danger that comes with the CEO being the company’s personality.

Will Men’s Wearhouse still be the same company after George Zimmer cashes in his chips?

Will Apple still be Apple after Steve Jobs enters immortality?

Southwest Airlines seamlessly maintained its personality, culture and high-flying success after the retirement of the inimitable Herb Kelleher, who wasn’t an easy act to follow. Not an easy feat but Southwest somehow pulled it off.

This can be accomplished when a personality is deeply ingrained into all facets of a company’s operation. Then it’s capable of surviving changes in leadership.

As has been demonstrated by the many human beings we know, personalities are not easily changed.

And corporate personalities are not easily created and propagated. But the upside to all this effort is very big.