Standing Out From The Crowd: Using Characters in Corporate Communications

Characters For Communications

Whether internal or external corporate communications can be difficult to master, as your messaging needs to resonate with a variety of audiences. Employees and clients alike can struggle to relate to messaging that’s overloaded with statistics or jargon. That’s where the usage of animated corporate characters comes in, providing a bridge for smoother corporate comms.

Using fictional characters to help you illustrate your message can lead to more effective marketing materials, training videos, onboarding materials, and explainer videos for customers. It can even give you a leg up in leadership training!

Learning how to integrate characters into your corporate communications can increase the effectiveness of your internal and external messaging in the following ways.

Using Corporate Characters in Internal Communications

Characters aren’t just for consumer advertising. While familiar icons like Tony the Tiger or the Michelin Man are often associated with marketing, the same storytelling techniques can have an even greater impact inside organisations.

In internal communications, animated corporate characters can help humanise complex messages, build empathy, and make abstract topics such as company values, compliance, or safety easier to understand and remember.

Externally, character-led brands command roughly 41% market share in their categories. The same attention and memory effects carry over to internal communications, where campaigns that use animated characters typically see higher engagement and recall than static or live-action messages.

Studies have long shown that audiences form stronger emotional connections with character-driven storytelling. The same principle applies to employees when characters represent familiar roles or scenarios within a company, messages feel more relatable and authentic.

At Sliced Bread Animation, we create corporate characters to bridge the gap between information and engagement, transforming traditional corporate updates, training, and culture films into stories that people connect with.

Using Characters in Animated Explainer Videos

The same can be said about using characters in explainer videos for customers, especially if your products or services are complex in nature. Fictional characters can help break down the important aspects of your product or service in a conversational tone, highlighting features in an engaging and easy-to-follow manner.

According to another study by the U.S.-based video production firm Running Pony, 96% of consumers have watched explainer videos to gain a deeper understanding of a product. In addition, 85% are more likely to make a purchase after watching such a video. The usage of characters in explainer videos makes them more memorable and fosters an immediate connection with the material.

Similarly, characters add effectiveness to explainer videos and other onboarding materials for employment candidates and new hires. These characters can walk your employees through safety procedures or introduce them to new products and services.

This can be especially helpful for businesses that operate in potentially dangerous fields — for instance, healthcare, construction, engineering, manufacturing, and more. Using characters helps viewers identify with and relate to your content, making this practice highly effective for communicating regulatory requirements and ongoing training.

Using Animated Corporate Characters for Leadership Training

The Harvard Business Review recently recommended reading fiction to develop leadership skills because fictional characters often “struggle to make choices congruent with their values.” Studying these characters helps leaders connect with people from different backgrounds and expand their ability to manage morally complex matters in the workplace.

Popular fiction is full of leaders worth following — there are so many great examples that it’s difficult to narrow down which ones to reference. For example, Albus Dumbledore from the Harry Potter series has many desirable traits. He has strong relationships with professors and students alike, yet has no trouble asserting his viewpoint when necessary. He’s a true visionary, yet he’s also emotionally intelligent and open to feedback.

Jean-Luc Picard from “Star Trek” is another fictional leader we can all learn from. He possesses unwavering morality and a dedication to ethical decision-making, which fosters a sense of loyalty amongst his crew. He also has great respect for other cultures and diverse backgrounds, which reflects well in today’s corporate landscape of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) principles

AI Powered Avatars

The next evolution of internal communication characters is being driven by AI. AI-powered avatars can now adapt dialogue, tone, and expression in real time, allowing employees to interact with digital characters that respond naturally to their input. This creates a more conversational, human experience that helps reinforce messages and build trust.

At Sliced Bread Animation, we’re exploring how AI characters can bring company training, and values to life through dynamic, interactive storytelling.

Conclusion – Characters in Corporate Communications

The usage of corporate characters in communications can also help avoid discrimination by creating non-human avatars to promote inclusive messaging. For greater effect, you can even combine character usage with gamification techniques and virtual reality (VR) training.

Contact us today to learn how we can create fictional characters to help your business communicate more effectively with customers, employees, and more. It’s an entertaining method of delivering important messages to broad audiences!

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