We keep asking "is our brand different online" — wrong question, it's "which version of us gets permission to show up"

Hey everyone, Miruna here, VP of Marketing at Planable 👋

TL;DR: the "we're more serious/value-driven, that's not us" objection is usually a personality problem in disguise, not a strategy problem.

Every brand looks at the accounts that go viral — Ryanair roasting its own planes, Duolingo losing its mind — and someone in the room says "that's not us." Fair. But how much of that is a fixed trait, versus just the version of the brand nobody's given permission to show up yet?

A few things I keep coming back to:

Personality is contextual, not fixed. I'm a different version of myself at drinks with friends than in a mentoring session — same person, different traits, different room. Brands work the same way. Social isn't the boardroom.

Think "party," not "pitch." Nobody likes the person who shows up to a party in a suit trying to sell detergent between handshakes. They like the person who tells a good story and mentions the detergent between cocktails, almost as an aside. Same goal, completely different reception.

Ditch the "marketese." Corporate-speak reads as cringe on social, full stop. "BUY THIS NOW" loses every time to something closer to "I have to mention this — what did you expect, I work here."

Nobody found their online personality by writing it down first. Ryanair and Duolingo didn't discover their voice in a brand manual — they found it by actually doing the weird thing and seeing it land.

Curious what it took for your team to get permission to be more human on social — a stakeholder conversation, a competitor's viral post, or someone just saying "let's try it"?