Your product needs a "Minimum Viable Personality"
A minimum viable product (MVP) has just enough key features for you to present it to your customers and see if there's demand for it. Similarly a product/brand also needs a "minimum viable personality" with just enough substance to see if it can capture the imagination of its target audience.
Personality is API for loyalty.
- Fake Grimlock
Traditional consumer goods companies have known this fact for decades. You'll never see a traditional consumer product launch without a properly thought out marketing plan. They consider marketing to be an integral part of the product - which is what it truly is, not just for consumer goods but for all goods.
The concept of marketing "big idea" from 60's era of Mad Men is very similar to what modern marketers call "minimum viable personality" these days.
Identifying a "personality" or a "marketing big idea" for your product requires coming up with tens of positioning angles and then methodically testing them to surface the winning "personality". Looking at the most successful marketing "big ideas" of the last 100 years, we notice three commonalities:
Piercing Insight
There are multiple ways of coming up with a piercing insight for marketing. Advertising guru Luke Sullivan suggests asking these questions: What is the most direct, unfiltered truth you can think of that describes the product, its customers, the public’s view of it, or your view. The truest truth. Another approach is to do a jobs-to-be-done analysis and see if you can come up with a "dormant desire or motivation" that hasn't been addressed by competitors yet.
Brand Connection
This is where advertising creativity comes into play. You have identified a piercing insight about the product category or the customer. Now we want to mesh that insight with our brand in such a way that it appears natural. Without this strong brand connect, you only have a meme that may get you likes but may not convert into sales. Brand connection with insight is what drives the engagement to sales.
Succinct Expression
Finally, your great insight and an awesome brand connection also needs to be expressed in a succinct way. Most successful marketing big ideas of last 100 years could be expressed in 8 words. So, that's our benchmark.