Your B2B brand personality doesn’t need to be boring. It can be fun, memorable, and, importantly, human.
So much B2B marketing copy still reads like it’s been written with all the personality carefully edited out.
It’s safe. Sensible. Often polite to a fault.
Yes, you’re trying to be professional. But the problem is that when your writing sounds the same as your competitors’, it won’t stand out.
And in a crowded B2B market, bland is far scarier (and more risky!) than bold.
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The brands that cut through are the ones brave enough to show a bit of character.
A dash of humour.
A clear point of view.
Creative campaigns that treat their audience like people, not job titles.
When done well, brand personality shouldn’t undermine a B2B brand’s credibility. It will strengthen it. Ultimately, making B2B marketing materials more engaging and far more memorable.
So consider this your guide to loosening the tie without losing the plot…
From understanding your audience to making data delicious and bending the rules (wisely), we’ll show how to inject personality into serious B2B marketing.
Let’s get started.
Step 1: Understand Your Audience
First things first: Your B2B brand personality will only work if it’s aimed at the right people.
Get this wrong, and what you think is a clever joke will land flat. But get it right, and your brand will hit the right note with the right people.
Build Proper Audience Personas and Segmentation
Strong brand personality starts with getting clear on exactly who your audience is.
That means you have to move beyond surface-level information like job titles and build detailed audience personas that reflect real people.
Get clear on aspects like:
- Their job role
- What industry challenges they face
- What influences their decision making
- Their preferred communication style
Think about it:
A procurement lead, a CTO, and a founder might all sit in the same buying journey, but they’re not going to respond to the same tone, language, or level of humour.
That said, if you have more than one audience persona that feels appropriate for your business, then the next step is to group audiences by industry, company size, or specific needs. You can then tailor your messaging to each group.
Adding personality to your brand might mean that you have to show up slightly differently, depending on who you’re talking to.
Do the Research
To build a solid B2B brand personality, you need to do the right homework.
Surveys, LinkedIn polls, interviews, and focus groups will help you understand how your audience thinks, speaks, and crucially, makes decisions.
Use this data to help you strike the right tone. Understanding the behavioural patterns of your audience will help you fine tune how far you can push personality.
Once you start putting content out there, you can track engagement patterns and content preferences to see what actually works with your target personas.
Make sure you can answer these questions:
- What’s getting shared?
- What is starting conversations?
- What’s being ignored?
These signals will tell you where personality adds value, as well as where it might distract from your message.
Practical tip: Use CRM and marketing data to personalise messaging with humour or references that make sense to each segment. A knowing wink is always going to beat a generic punchline.
Example: A software company creates separate content streams for C-suite decision makers and technical end users. They keep messaging benefit led and concise for executives, but they add more playful, insider humour for the people using the product day to day.
Step 2: Find a Unique Voice
Want your B2B brand to be memorable? Start by giving it character.
Stories, metaphors, and well-placed humour will help humanise your marketing. They make complex ideas easier to understand and, crucially, far more engaging.
This doesn’t mean turning every campaign into a comedy sketch (tempting though it may be). But you should give your brand a clear character and let that character show up consistently through your B2B brand personality.
So how do you do that?
Define a Brand Voice (And Stick to It)
Start by getting clear on how your brand voice sounds.
Ask yourself:
- Are you playful and witty?
- Calm and confident?
- Relaxed, but still professional?
Whatever you choose, consistency is key.
A defined brand voice helps your audience recognise you instantly and builds familiarity over time. It also gives your team clear boundaries, as they will know how far they can push tone without losing credibility.
Use Storytelling
Storytelling is one of the simplest ways to inject B2B brand personality.
Stories give context and create emotion. Storytelling helps your audience follow along without having to work too hard.
This can take many forms:
- Blog posts that explain a problem through a narrative
- Case studies that focus on people rather than process
- Video content that walks through a challenge step by step
- Customer success stories that feel like conversations and not sales pitches
The goal isn’t to entertain for the sake of it, you’re adding personality and story for a reason. It should make your message clearer and more memorable.
Consider Recurring Characters or Campaign Devices
For some brands, recurring characters or mascots can help bring personality to life (oh hi Mark 👋), especially when explaining complex or technical topics.
Used sparingly and with intention, mascots and characters can become recognisable shortcuts for your brand. They reinforce identity without the need to over-explain.
The key here is alignment: If you choose to go down this route, your character (and its personality) needs to fit your audience and your sector, if not, it will feel forced.
Test, Learn, Refine
Remember: You don’t have to go all in straight away.
Start small. Test playful language or subtle jokes in LinkedIn posts and see how people respond.
Stay aware of what’s landing and what isn’t. Make sure you’re looking at engagement levels, comments, and shares so that you understand what’s landing. This gives you confidence to build personality gradually, rather than guessing and hoping for the best.
Practical tip: Trial lighter language or small moments of humour in low-risk channels like social media before rolling it out across bigger campaigns.
Example: A logistics company introduces a monster mascot called Frankentruck to explain complex shipping processes on social media. By turning technical concepts into short, story-led posts, they increase engagement by 30%, without dumbing anything down.
Step 3: Make Data Delicious (Without Being Scary)
B2B marketers often spend their days buried under spreadsheets, KPIs, and dashboards.
It’s easy for numbers to feel dry or overwhelming. But data doesn’t have to be scary. With the right approach, it can be engaging, and even fun.
The trick is turning numbers into stories your audience can understand and want to act on.
Turn Numbers into Visual Stories
Visual storytelling is your best friend here. Anything from charts and infographics to playful diagrams will help to turn raw data into something people want to look at and think about.
Pick out key stats, trends, or patterns that help sell your offering, and communicate them in ways that are clear and compelling.
A single well-designed chart can communicate more than pages of text ever could. Not to mention it’s loads more memorable too.
Humanise the Data
Numbers feel less intimidating when they’re relatable.
A stat like “80% of clients saved X hours” becomes more engaging when you frame it creatively. For example:
“That’s the equivalent of getting a full working day back every month. Time your team can spend on strategy instead of spreadsheets.”
Adding context and personality helps your audience see the real life impact, rather than just the numbers.
Experiment with Interactive Content
Interactive tools are a novel way to bring data to life.
Think ROI calculators, quizzes, or dashboards. They let your audience explore results themselves, which makes the insights more personal and actionable.
On Canny, for example, we have we’ve built a project calculator that helps businesses estimate the likely investment for branding and website projects.
Instead of downloading a generic rate card, users answer a few tailored questions and receive a realistic budget range based on their specific needs.
This helps set expectations early for potential clients and removes uncertainty.
It turns pricing, which can often be a friction point, into something transparent and useful.
Gamifying these experiences can increase engagement and boost lead conversion.
Step 4: Know When to Break the Rules
By now, you’ll know that at Canny, we don’t believe B2B marketing has to be stiff or overly serious.
But even with the best intentions, it’s easy to feel like you have to fall in line and follow a set of unspoken “rules” when promoting B2B products and services.
We say: question the rule book. (Don’t shred it entirely… let’s not get carried away.)
Sometimes creativity is about bending the rules and doing things a little differently… hence, Mark.
The key is knowing where the line is. Break the right rules and your brand stands out. Break the wrong ones, and credibility will go out the window along with the rule book.
Try Unconventional Formats
Selling SaaS? Running a recruitment agency? You might assume formats like GIFs, memes, short videos, or animations aren’t “for you”.
In reality, they can be exactly what helps set you apart from your competitors.
Used thoughtfully, unconventional formats can add personality and improve engagement. They make complex ideas easier to digest without undermining your expertise.
Use Humour (Tastefully)
Humour doesn’t mean being flippant or trying to go viral at all costs. It’s about relatability.
A well-placed meme or light joke can make your brand feel more human and approachable, especially in sectors that are traditionally very serious.
If you’ve got some one liners that you think support the message and feel on-brand, then test them out and see how they land.
Experiment Before You Commit
Not every idea needs to be a big, high-stakes campaign. Pilot new creative approaches on a small scale and pay attention to how your audience reacts.
Short-form social content, email subject lines, or campaign teasers are great places to test the waters before rolling ideas out more widely.
Practical tip: Add creative twists to traditionally “boring” content. Try turning a whitepaper summary into a comic strip or a short explainer video to make it more accessible and engaging.
Example: A cybersecurity firm creates an escape room video series to explain risk management concepts. By turning a complex topic into an interactive experience, they boost engagement while keeping the message clear and credible.
Step 5: Team Up With Fellow Monsters: Collaboration & Advocacy
In B2B marketing, collaboration helps creativity thrive. It’s what will keep your B2B brand personality consistent across every touchpoint.
If your brand personality lives purely in your marketing copy, it can feel very surface-level. But if it’s shared and projected by your team and your partners, it becomes a believable part of your brand.
Turn Your Team into Brand Advocates
Your employees are some of your most powerful brand storytellers. You can encourage them to share branded content in their own voice, adding personality and perspective that feels natural rather than scripted.
This not only extends reach, but it’s also going to make your brand feel more human and trustworthy.
Collaborate Through Partnerships
Partnership and co-branded campaigns can be a great way to introduce personality into serious sectors.
Working with like-minded brands gives you permission to experiment, share audiences, and add a bit more creative energy to your campaigns.
But the key here is alignment. Creating a partnership with a business that has different values can spell disaster. Make sure that you have shared values, complementary audiences, and a similar appetite for creativity before agreeing to work with anyone.
Bring Client Stories to Life
We all know testimonials are a great way to build brand trust. When building your B2B brand personality, remember that testimonials and case studies don’t have to read like formal reports.
You can use storytelling and humour to help bring client experiences to life. It may sound obvious, but make your clients sound like actual people! Testimonials should not come across like press releases. Allow your client’s personality and your brand personality to shine through, and your message will land more strongly.
B2B Brand Personality: A Canny Example
As a B2B business that likes to have serious fun, we’re always looking for ways to inject a bit more personality into Canny’s brand.
Enter: Mark.
A monster literally born from our founder, Tony, asking, “Why is B2B branding normally so boring?!”
Mark adds fun, but he was actually a very strategic marketing decision, designed to embody the balance we try to strike at Canny: serious work, delivered with a little fun.
Mark allows us to show who we are, without spelling it out in bullet points or corporate jargon.
We’ve found that B2B branding is often safe and corporate. Perfect for fitting in but terrible for standing out. And, as a creative agency, we really need to be able to stand out.
Mark gave us a way to do this. He perfectly embodies the personality traits that we value:
- Confident but approachable: Mark’s fun design is hard to ignore, but his playful character makes our brand feel friendly. Just like us.
- Creative, not gimmicky: Every feature of Mark and his story is purposeful. It reflects the strategic thinking behind Canny’s work.
- Human, not corporate: Mark might be a monster, but he helps our audience connect with us on a human level.
Mark lets us communicate our brand personality across everything we do – whether that’s pitches or social content, and even at events. When our audience sees Mark, they know they’re engaging with a brand that’s creative and approachable, and unafraid to be a little different.
Basically, Mark isn’t just a monster. He’s a living example of how brand personality can make B2B marketing more human and engaging.
A Guide to B2B Brand Personality: Making Marketing Less Boring
B2B marketing doesn’t have to be bland to be believable. But building a strong B2B brand personality isn’t about being gimmicky or chasing attention for the sake of it.
For B2B brand personality to be successful, it needs to be intentional. Take the time to understand who you’re talking to, how you want to sound, and think about where creativity is going to add value to your business.
When personality is used with purpose, it can make serious marketing feel more human.
Stories will land better. Data becomes easier to digest. Campaigns feel considered rather than boring.
And your brand becomes something people remember and enjoy engaging with.
Remember: You don’t need to overhaul everything overnight. Start with one small move in your next B2B campaign. Loosen the tone slightly.
Rethink how you present a piece of data. Test a more creative format where it makes sense.
Showing a bit of personality (done well) is what turns everyday B2B marketing into creative campaigns that stand out and stick in your customers’ minds.
Need some help building your B2B brand personality? Let’s talk.
