The strongest brands are the ones with the most distinctive personalities. But even a weak and faded personality is better than none at all.

A brand with a personality is an imaginary character in the minds of the customers of that brand. It is similar to the characters in syndicated television shows, bestselling novels, and big movie franchises.

Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, and Robin Williams are actors, but they are also characters in your mind.

Willie Nelson, Michael Jackson, and Taylor Swift are musicians. but they are also characters in your mind.

Brands are like that.

Two people are now going to tell us about books.

Dear Person Reading This,

A writer can fit a whole world inside a book. Really. You can go there. You can learn things while you are away. You can bring them back to the world you normally live in.

You can look out of another person’s eyes, think their thoughts, care about what they care about.

You can fly. You can travel to the stars. You can be a monster or a wizard or a god. You can be a girl. You can be a boy. Books give you worlds of infinite possibility. All you have to do is be interested enough to read that first page…

Somewhere, there is a book written just for you. It will fit in your mind like a glove fits your hand. And it’s waiting.

Go look for it.

Neil Gaiman

A Velocity of Being, Letters to a Young Reader, p. 22

Brands are like novels and movies and TV shows. Brands are like hit songs. Brands are like actors and musicians. Brands are like good books.

Here is the second person.

Dear Reader,

When I was 12, I was given a scholarship to a private girl’s school in the town where I lived. All the other girls came from another – wealthier – town. They were driven to school in Jaguars and Mercedes Benzes. They ate artichokes. No way would I ever fit in.

In the midst of my funk, the English teacher assigned A Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers. As it happens, Frankie, the book’s heroine, is also 12 and also wants to belong. Her yearning is such that she wants to know everyone in the world and for everyone to know her – exactly what I wanted!

That’s what stunned me, not just the intensity of the longing, but the specificity. It meant – it had to mean – there were other people in the world like me. Not just Frankie, a fictional character, but the author who had to have felt that way herself in order to give Frankie that longing. I felt such an intimate connection with her, as if she’d looked deep inside me and knew me in the way I wanted the world to know me. Reading didn’t just offer escape; it offered connection!

All these years later, I just have to look at my copy of A Member of the Wedding on my bookshelf to experience again how I felt when I first read it and to feel the full force of that connection: to Frankie, to Carson McCullers, to the 12-year-old girl I was, and to 12-year-olds everywhere.

Emily Levine

A Velocity of Being, Letters to a Young Reader, p. 52

A brand with a personality is like A Member of the Wedding, written by Carson McCullers.

Who was the first ad writer to give a brand a distinctive personality?

That’s like asking, “Who built the first car?” To answer that question, we would first have to agree upon the defining characteristics of a car.

For us to agree upon “Who was the...