Why brand personality matters more than reach.

Visibility vs memorability

Every brand right now wants more visibility.

More reach. More impressions. More followers. More eyes on the business.

And honestly, fair enough. Attention matters. Visibility matters. If nobody knows your brand exists, growth becomes difficult pretty quickly.

But there’s a difference between being seen and being remembered, and that’s the part a lot of businesses still don’t fully understand. Because more people seeing your brand won’t automatically make people care about it, and it definitely won’t fix the fact that most brands feel completely interchangeable.

Businesses often think they have an awareness issue when they actually have a personality issue. They assume the problem is reach, when the real problem is memorability.

Standing out has never been harder. According to Forbes, it is reported that people are exposed to thousands of advertisements every day; consumers are bombarded with marketing messages across digital and traditional channels daily. When audiences are filtering that much information constantly, generic branding disappears almost instantly.

And that’s the issue. Brands are posting every single day that still somehow feel invisible. Not because the algorithm is against them. Not because the market is “too saturated”. Not because people suddenly stopped caring about what they sell.

But because the brand itself feels like it could belong to literally anyone.

Same tone of voice. Same visual identity. Same safe messaging. Same polished corporate personality designed to offend absolutely nobody and excite even fewer people.

And once a brand starts sounding like everybody else in the market, it becomes almost impossible for audiences to emotionally attach themselves to it.

Branding isn’t just visual anymore. It’s behavioural.

The brands audiences actually remember tend to have energy. Perspective. Humour. Emotional consistency. They feel like they stand for something beyond generic marketing language and a Canva template.

That’s something we see constantly through branding projects at co&co too. Businesses focus heavily on how the brand looks before thinking properly about how the brand sounds, behaves or emotionally connects with people online. 

And honestly, that’s usually where the disconnect starts. Because branding isn’t just visual anymore. It’s behavioural.

How your business communicates online matters just as much as your logo does now. Your captions, tone of voice, messaging, social content and audience interaction all shape perception in real time, which is why personality and tone of voice have become such an important part of modern brand strategy.

Liquid Death understood this before most brands did.

Let’s be honest for a second.

Liquid Death is selling canned water.

That’s it.

Not some revolutionary product nobody’s ever seen before. Not groundbreaking technology. Not a category-defining innovation. Just water in a can.

And yet the brand has built one of the most recognisable identities in modern consumer branding.

Forbes reported that Liquid Death reached $263 million in retail sales in 2023 and secured a $1.4 billion valuation in 2024, which is ridiculous in the best possible way when you remember we are still, technically, talking about water.

Why?

Because they understood something most businesses still haven’t fully grasped.

Personality scales faster than product features.

Everything about Liquid Death feels intentional. The heavy metal aesthetic, the anti-corporate humour, the campaigns, the language, the tone of voice. You instantly know when something belongs to them because the brand identity is emotionally distinct.

That level of recognisability is incredibly valuable.

Because people don’t just buy products anymore. They buy identity. Taste. Entertainment. Cultural alignment. A sense of belonging.

Liquid Death became memorable because they stopped acting like a water company and started acting like a brand people genuinely wanted to engage with.

That’s a massive difference.

Most Brands Are Too Scared to Commit to an Identity

This is where a lot of businesses get stuck.

They want personality, but only if absolutely everybody likes it.

Which completely defeats the point.

Strong brands are naturally polarising to some degree. Not in a fake controversial way designed purely for attention, but in a clear way. A recognisable way. The strongest brands create a specific feeling and commit to it consistently.

That’s what makes them memorable.

Meanwhile, generic brands spend years trying to appeal to everybody and end up emotionally connecting with nobody at all.

You can usually tell when a brand is terrified of having an actual personality because everything feels watered down. The opinions are vague. The tone is overly safe. The messaging sounds like it’s been approved by twelve different stakeholders trying not to upset anyone on LinkedIn.

And audiences feel that immediately.

Research reported by Social Media Today found that authenticity remains one of the most important factors in determining which brands consumers choose to engage with and support.

People connect with clarity. They connect with conviction. They connect with brands that feel emotionally confident in who they are.

That is exactly where brand strategy comes in.

At co&co, we do not believe branding should sit in a pretty PDF and never be used again. A good brand should shape how you write, post, campaign, sell, launch, hire, host events and show up in front of your audience.

It should give the business a clear point of view.

We’ve seen this play out through our work with FOUND, where the objective wasn't simply creating a more polished identity but helping the brand feel clearer, more distinctive and more emotionally recognisable within its market.

A memorable brand creates emotional shortcuts

The real power of brand personality is that it reduces the amount of effort people need to understand you.

Think about the brands you instantly recognise online. Chances are you can identify them before you even see the logo.

Why?

Because their personality has become familiar enough to recognise instinctively. The way they write captions. The type of humour they use. The pacing of their content. The emotional tone behind everything they post.

That consistency creates memory.

And memory creates trust.

Not just visibility.

A lot of businesses are chasing reach while completely ignoring the fact that audiences don’t emotionally remember them afterwards. Which means all that visibility ends up becoming noise instead of brand equity.

Because if people see your content but couldn’t describe your brand personality afterwards, the awareness itself becomes fairly meaningless.

This is exactly why brand strategy and positioning work matters so much before businesses start throwing money at distribution.

If your brand disappeared tomorrow, would anybody notice?

Honestly, it’s probably one of the best branding questions you can ask yourself.

Because if your content vanished overnight and nobody could distinguish it from the next brand in your industry, that’s not an awareness problem.

That’s a branding problem.

The businesses winning attention right now aren’t always the loudest brands in the market. They’re usually the clearest. The most emotionally recognisable. The ones with an actual perspective and a consistent identity attached to them.

That’s what creates memorability.

And memorability is what makes marketing compound over time.

More visibility simply amplifies who you already are.

If your brand already feels distinctive, personality-driven and emotionally recognisable, more reach strengthens that recognition. It reinforces familiarity.

But if your brand feels generic?

More visibility just exposes more people to something forgettable.

That’s why branding still matters far more than a lot of businesses think it does. Because before audiences trust your marketing, engage with your content or buy into your product, they need to actually remember you first.

And in a world full of brands all fighting for the same attention, personality is often the difference between being seen briefly and being remembered properly.

This is where co&co comes in...

At co&co, we help brands stop blending in and start building something people actually remember.

That means getting clear on the strategy first. Not just the logo. Not just the colours. Not just the content calendar.

The actual brand.

What you stand for. How you sound. What you want people to feel. How your audience should experience you online, offline and everywhere in between.

From brand strategy and tone of voice to organic social, activations and placemaking, we help businesses build brands with a bit more backbone. Brands that do not just look good in a presentation, but actually show up properly in the real world.

And that does not happen by playing it safe.

Think your brand could be doing more? Let’s have a chat.