A Stellar Guide: Brand Character Development for Fintechs (With Case Studies)

Trust has been eroded in the financial service industry.

Customers have seemingly given up on the industry from a perceived delivery of poor service and a slew of scandals. PwC centered down to one word that sums up customer sentiment towards banks, insurers, fund managers, and other product providers: apathy.

Research by PwC reveals just how low trust in financial services companies has now sunk. For now, consumers’ lack of trust is indiscriminate. As the data visualization shown below reveals fewer than one in three consumers now trust their bank, while for other types of financial services companies, ratings are even lower.

Financial service businesses must rebuild trust with both customers and the wider market to overcome the pervasive distrust in the industry—a distrust that, if left unaddressed, could unfairly be negatively projected onto their brand.

"The fact that certain types of institution have been at the forefront of industry issues in recent years has not prevented other organisations from suffering reputational damage. For example, fund managers, which played little or no role in the financial crisis, appear to be the least trusted of all financial services firms."

Furthermore, PwC found 8 significant concerns driving the perception of apathy. And the largest concern behind quality products and security is business ethics. When consumers express concerns about business ethics in the financial services industry, they are worried about how companies in this sector behave, especially regarding honesty, fairness, and transparency.

Introducing a brand character is one of the more powerful tools for financial service businesses can leverage to address customer concerns about business ethics. It helps humanize the company, serves as a relatable figure embodying the company's values, transparency, and ethical practices, and directly builds trust and connection with their target market!

And that is why developing your character is vital to unlocking increased customer acquisition by fostering desirable consumer perceptions and behaviors toward your high-quality and secure product.

Well, we at Orians & Company will answer all that and provide more useful resources and information to help and guide you on your journey of brand character development!

Table of Contents:

Why Do You Need a Brand Character?

A brand character is the core personality of your company, it embodies all the values and attitudes that represent your business and its mission.

Think of it as an actor who plays your company's role in all marketing and communication materials and improves the delivery of your core message.

Therefore, this brand character becomes the strongest dictator for your brand image and helps influence the way you want your customers to perceive your business before even experiencing your product offering.

Now that is powerful!

Your brand character should be a guiding light for your business, as its attitudes and values should be consistent across your culture and all customer channels from media and ads, all the way to customer support.

And most importantly, your brand character should be unique in order to become a massive differentiator for your business!

Identifying & Developing Your Company's Brand Character

1) Define Your Brand’s Core Identity

If you are feeling stuck, wondering where to even start from, its best to first reflect on your brand's identity holistically. This means asking yourself:

• What are the core values of your brand?
• What is your brand’s mission and vision?
• Who is your target audience, and what do they care about?
• What are the emotions or qualities of your brand (aka your brand's personality)?
• What kind of feeling do I want my customers to have when they interact with my brand?

In order to create a character that represents your company's brand. You need to understand what is your brand exactly, and answering these questions helps formulate an otherwise complex concept into something more understandable and clear.

Take your time, and ensure that you have accurately conceptualized the identity of your company's brand.

After answering these questions, you can have a better direction and understanding of the type of character that is appropriate for your business!

2. Determine the Qualities of Your Brand Character

We head back to our favorite chart in branding, the brand archetype!

This tool helps determine the characteristics of your brand character based on the purpose and values of your company.

By answering the above questions in step 1, you can confidently determine a character trait and better conceptualize the design of your character that is unique and appropriate for your company's brand with the use of this tool.

This step is crucial because we all know we have emotional connections with some brands, despite the relationship being purely transactional. This is largely due to the brands prioritizing and leveraging the science of archetypes, which can massively influence customer behavior towards the company.

This idea is further backed by a recent study by Harvard School Professor Gerald Zaltman, where he found that

"A whopping 95% of our purchasing decisions are made in the subconscious mind"

This means brand characters with a strong archetypal personality that connects with customers on an emotional level, have a massive competitive advantage in the market.

This further emphasizes the importance of having an appealing brand character in the first place!

3. Design Your Brand Character: Aligning the Character with Your Brand’s Message

Once you've defined your company's brand identity and your brand character's qualities and behaviors, you may have developed a better visual idea of how your brand character should look like.

Now, unfortunately, this step is purely creative, and there isn't any defined step carried out to concretely create your brand character's design.

However, before putting pencil to paper or opening Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop to aimlessly create digital art, consider the following tips to guide you through this creative process:

• Know Your Target Audience:

Understanding the demographic your fintech brand serves is crucial.

For instance, characters aimed at financially fluent and sophisticated customers might want to embody a more sophisticated look with sleek lines and modern aesthetics.

While characters for audiences intimidated by finances could feature playful, approachable designs that simplify complex financial concepts.

• Practice World-Building:

Consider the ecosystem your character inhabits. These worlds can be inspired by real-life events and eras, or well-known experiences and media that evoke certain emotions and associations that resonate with your target customers.

If your customers are hard-working entrepreneurs, you may want to build your character in a world inspired by a period where people had grit, and remained optimistic and resilient such as the Great Depression in the 1920s.

And if your customers are anxious and intimidated millennials in poor financial positions, you may want to have your character design inspired by a world of 80s-90s surf-skate style which associates the brand with fun and joyful experiences; resonating with your target audience and set the brand apart from negative associations in their industry/competitors.

• Understand Shape Language:

Utilizing basic shapes to build a character can convey your character’s traits and values and make your character design more memorable through its more simplistic design.

Rounded shapes may suggest friendliness and approachability, ideal for a brand focused on personal finance, while angular shapes might imply strength and reliability, perfect for investment or insurance firms.

The arrangement and composition of shapes may also convey more specific associations, such as if it's layered slightly away from one another it may convey disruption and innovation, and if it follows a symmetrical arrangement it may convey balance, order, and professionalism.

• Explore the Character's Personality:

It's best to model your brand character's personality, hopes, dreams, and backstory with your ideal customers to not only create an incredibly relatable character that effectively delivers your core message, but also design a unique character.

These traits can help guide and influence your design choice. If your audience dreams of a relaxed life with money working for them, your character design can be lazy with cute and simple features. The point of this is to make your brand character relatably visualize your audience's dreams and/or experiences.

• Draw Inspiration from Animals, Human Stereotypes, or Anthropomorphized Objects

Many iconic brand characters have been inspired by or linked to animals, fictional beings, or anthropomorphized objects. So looking deeper into those concepts may help in your ideation process.

This is because a couple of well-known associations have already been made for these entities. Therefore by leveraging them into your brand character, you can easily build upon the pre-existing ideas and meanings created from that animal or object.

If your product is designed for more resourceful management of your customers' finances and your customers lack financial acumen, your character can be inspired by a squirrel which represents resourcefulness, adaptability, and playfulness!

4. Test Character Concepts

Before finalizing the design, develop several character concepts and test them with your target audience.

You can leverage focus groups and gather feedback on which character design resonates most with your ideal customers. Or you can also do A/B Testing, where you use digital platforms to test different character designs and see which one performs better in terms of engagement and recognition.

5. Refine and Finalize the Design

Based on the feedback, refine your character’s design to better align with your brand and audience preferences.

Adopt an iterative design process, where you constantly make adjustments to the character’s appearance, personality, and story until it perfectly represents your brand.

And ensure the character is versatile and can be used across various platforms (e.g., website, social media, advertisements) while maintaining consistency in appearance and messaging.

6. Integrate the Character into Your Brand Strategy

Once the design is finalized, integrate the character into your brand’s overall strategy:

• Marketing Campaigns:

Use the character consistently in advertising, social media, and content marketing. They should be featured prominently across all channels to build brand recognition.

• Customer Interaction:

The character can be used in customer communications, such as chatbots and email campaigns. And its persona can play as a guideline for the customer service team when interacting with customers; all of these efforts are done to create a cohesive and meaningful brand experience.

If done correctly, your brand character can become a valuable asset to your customer acquisition efforts, from its level of influence, emotional connection with your target customers, and strength of associations built over time between the character and positive customer perceptions!

Case Studies:

Acorns' Squirrel

Voiced by the iconic actor, Christopher Walken, Acorns brilliantly introduced a brand character into their YouTube videos and TV commercials.

This charming, animated squirrel has dramatically boosted the perceptions and performance of Acorns' marketing efforts, with the lovable character bringing in over 32.5 million views on aggregate on YouTube alone!

The character humanizes the brand, allowing Acorns to translate the engagement and love from the character towards enhancing customer loyalty towards their business.

The Squirrel brings in a resourceful, playful, and charismatic vibe that extends the brand experience of inclusivity and simplicity outside their app and website, encouraging viewers and potential customers to think about their financial future and investing with Acorns in a more positive and approachable way!

NEXT's Early 1900s Characters

NEXT’s visual branding and character design is inspired by times of economic and social adversity, such as the Great Depression in the 1920s and the inflationary struggles of the 1970s. During those periods, people remained optimistic and resilient, pushing forward despite challenging conditions.

By drawing from these eras, NEXT taps into the spirit of optimism, hard work, and grit that defines many small business owners.

Their visual style uses playful, hand-drawn elements that feel approachable and human. This is a deliberate contrast to the typically sterile and corporate feel of many insurance companies.

NEXT’s design choices convey sincerity, positivity, and a can-do attitude, reinforcing the idea that small businesses are resourceful and capable of thriving in tough circumstances.

The hand-drawn style also evokes a sense of authenticity, suggesting that NEXT is a company that understands the real challenges and aspirations of small businesses. It connects emotionally with its audience, creating a brand identity that feels personal and uplifting.

Flo from Progressive (Insurtech)

Flo is a great example of how effective a fictional person can be as a brand character. She’s highly recognizable and always communicates the perks of using Progressive over other insurance companies.

Her character design reflects a retro aesthetic, resembling a 1950s diner waitress, which conveys approachability and warmth. The creators aimed to make her memorable and relatable, embodying the qualities of trust and helpfulness that customers look for in an insurance provider.

Flo's upbeat personality and distinctive look, including her signature white apron and name tag, have made her an iconic figure in advertising, effectively communicating Progressive's commitment to customer service.

And with Flo having 65,000 followers on Twitter, it demonstrates the character’s reach and influence beyond traditional commercials, and amount of brand recall her character brings to the company's target market!

Conclusion

Customers tend to see their purchases as more than just simple transactions, but as a solution that caters to their pain points, and as an extension of the customers' true values and identities!

Making these simple transactions into more purposeful experiences is the entire essence of branding, and the best way to form that perception and experience is by an emotionally impactful brand identity!

A resonant brand character serves as a powerful tool to set your brand apart, forge emotional connections with your audience, and cultivate a loyal customer base that endures over time. And I hope this guide perfectly explains that!

And I understand that a lot of information and valuable insights have been dropped in this one post, but don't start feeling intimidated by it!

This blog explained the 6 main steps for identifying & developing your company's brand character:

1) Define Your Brand’s Core Identity

2. Determine the Qualities of Your Brand Character

3. Design Your Brand Character: Aligning the Character with Your Brand’s Message

4. Test Character Concepts

5. Refine and Finalize the Design

6. Integrate the Character into Your Brand Strategy

Take one step at a time, and ensure you perform in-depth market research on your business correctly, as it will determine the level of success of your entire brand narrative campaign!

But if you still seem underconfident and require more guidance tailored to your business's needs and circumstances, don't hesitate to click that "Book an Appointment" button. I and my team will be more than happy to conduct a free session to clear out doubts and strategize viable routes to take in your business's branding journey!