Bringing Brand Personality to Life
Beyond style guides and tone of voice, brand personality is about being distinct.
Our brand personality is fundamental to how we express ourselves.
Our tone and style guides will ensure the quality of the content you create. But we also want our content to be distinctively 'Newcastle University'.
That’s about how we weave our brand personality, aspirations and values into our content.
Core values
To bring our brand personality to life, we need to incorporate three layers of values that guide everything we do at Newcastle University.
This starts with our core values:
- equality, diversity and inclusion
- social and environmental justice
- academic freedom
We need to behave in a particular way to be able to stand for these values. Our aspirational values signal those behaviours:
- excellence
- creativity
- impact
As content creators, we must then bring those values to life to create a consistent brand personality.
This means that our content needs to be:
- determined
- visionary
- conscientious
Below we show how these values connect. You can bring them to life through the content that you create, and how we behave in creating that content.
Aspirational value: Impact
Brand personality: Determined
Creating impact requires determination and our content brings out that spirit of determination. This shows our tenacious commitment to have an impact on the communities that we serve.
To bring this to life, our content must:
- generate a sense of energy, action and movement, creating a future-focused narrative
- show our audiences how they will be part of the impact that we can create
- talk about our goals, dreams and the impact we commit to creating, not just what we’ve already achieved
Aspirational value: Creativity
Brand personality: Visionary
Generating creativity requires us to have the courage to be visionary. Our content brings our commitment to being visionary to life. It evokes a spirit of curiosity with conviction and imagination.
To bring this to life, our content must:
- showcase our curiosity and willingness to explore creative solutions to real problems
- adopt a future-focused narrative that invites our audience to be visionary and creative with us
- embrace creativity in our approach to content creation, and a willingness to try new formats and content approaches
Aspirational value: Excellence
Brand personality: Conscientious
Our solid foundation of conscientiousness enables our commitment to excellence. We carry this through our content by what we say and share, and also in how we do it.
To bring this to life, our content must:
- showcase the highest standards of quality and accuracy by ensuring content is up to date and grammatically correct
- be thorough and always strive to be inclusive and accessible
- refer to our values and our commitment to uphold them, while bringing our audience with us in living them
Our tone of voice is an important part of how we bring brand personality to life through individual words and phrases. We recommend that you also read that alongside this page.