What The Bear teaches us about brand character

Three words, in Carmy’s phone contacts. Bad punctuation. Out of date (Pete is now Sugar’s husband). Time poor (updating his contacts is bottom of this troubled chef’s to-do list).

When Christopher Storer’s The Bear first launched onto our screens in 2022, it blew viewers away. Its always visceral, sometimes too tense-to-watch insight into the world of restaurateuring, its high stakes family drama, its reverential precision and clear love of food. Everyone was watching.

For so many of us, it was the characters. Carmy (Jeremy Allen White), Syd (Ayo Edebiri), Richie (Ebon Moss-Barach) and Sug (Abby Elliot) stole our hearts because they were completely believable. Real, flawed, infuriating, endearing. Humans, in all their brilliance laid bare.

Authentic. You might say, if you could bear it. As a word, it is at risk of suffering the same fate as passionate, purposeful, or even storyteller – a level of semantic bleaching that renders it inert and makes any writer worth their salt shudder. Everyone is ‘authentic’ now, even if they aren’t.

But its sentiment and value holds true. We care about these characters because they are real to us, feel genuine. We believe in them because every behaviour, identifier and word they utter, or type, feels completely honest and true to who we’re told they are.

When building and writing characters, this is the holy grail. It’s how we connect, forge loyalty and remain committed to the stories we’re told.

And it’s not just the reserve of prestige TV.

For brands, true character matters and works the same way. Audiences are so savvy now they can sniff artificiality in a heartbeat – and leaving customers, supporters, donors to discover an inauthenticity is far more damaging than never claiming you had it.

So how can we be sure the brand characters we’re building and the stories they live within feel real? It’s in the small things that layer up to reinforce the truth at every turn. Often this means fallibilities as much as strength, candour and recognition about what you struggle with as much as what you ace every time.

Like Carmy and his phone. This most specific of details tells us so much about his character, reinforces what we already know of him, makes him even more believable. He is too busy and focused on other things to update his contacts list. He doesn’t care about possessive apostrophes. He can’t even quite remember (or couldn’t when he was told it) his sister’s husband’s name. All of that chimes with the big character traits and behaviours we know Carmy to have, the actions he’s taken and the choices he’s made. It’s tiny, subtle, blink-and-you’d-miss-it stuff. But it is also vital.

World-building like this is what separates iconic TV from mediocre algorithm-fodder. That a contacts list on a phone with barely a second of screen time gets as much thought put into whether it’s right for a character as a final line of dialogue in a season finale, speaks volumes.

It’s a superlative level of attention to detail that’s won the show fans, to the extent that we are all chomping at the bit for season five (perhaps the last?) and itching to join the queue for a famous Chicagoland beef from Ebrahim’s hatch.

It’s also what separates good brands from great ones. An attention to detail so close, to create a brand so real and true (and fallible – honestly it goes a long way), will ensure a brand story that fans gravitate towards and a character they root for.

Even though Carmy is challenging and continues to struggle with his relationships, work and where his future will lead, we’re with him 100% because of it.

The lesson’s pretty clear here right? (And no, it’s not about the importance of possessive apostrophes, although that post is coming…)

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