How to Create Custom Characters That Reflect Your Brand and Audience

Read Time: 4 minutes

Custom animated characters are more than visual decoration — they are visual ambassadors of your brand and the people you serve. Characters help you tell meaningful stories, engage audiences, and simplify complex messages by giving your content a recognizable face and personality. Whether you’re creating explainer videos, training modules, or social content, characters that reflect your brand and audience deepen connection and boost comprehension.

With tools like Powtoon’s Character Builder, creating these characters is accessible to teams of all sizes, without costly design software or specialist skills.

Why Custom Characters Matter in Brand Communication

Characters Help Define Your Brand’s Personality

Custom characters act as a consistent visual voice for your brand. They embody your values, tone, and personality so audiences feel an emotional connection, not just read text or see generic stock visuals. Brand mascots — from the Geico Gecko to the Pillsbury Doughboy — serve as memorable, trust-forming representatives of their companies.

Characters Make Complex Ideas More Relatable

Characters are especially effective at breaking down complicated ideas into simple, visual stories that audiences can follow. Animation research shows that people retain information better when it’s delivered with engaging visuals rather than static text alone.

Characters Increase Inclusion and Audience Recognition

Audiences want to see themselves reflected in the content they watch. Custom characters allow you to represent diverse identities, styles, and personas, making your message feel more inclusive and relevant to the viewer.

How to Design Custom Characters That Match Your Brand

Creating characters that resonate with your brand starts with visualizing your brand as a personality:

Ask yourself what traits embody your brand — professional, playful, youthful, formal, adventurous, etc.
Think about how those traits show up visually — clothing, posture, accessories, and expressions.
Use your brand’s colors, logo, and visual vocabulary to ensure characters feel connected to your overall design system.

With Powtoon’s Character Builder, you can tailor characters by adjusting:

Facial features and skin tones
Hairstyles and outfits
Accessories and professional roles
Animated expressions and poses
Brand color schemes and logos

Making Characters That Reflect Your Audience

Your audience isn’t one thing — it’s a group of individuals with their own preferences, demographics, and cultural contexts. When characters mirror who your audience is, your content becomes more relatable and engaging.

Identify the Audience Persona

Consider who your audience is and what they value:

What age groups or professions do they represent?
What styles or aesthetics resonate with them?
What visual cues make them feel “seen” when watching a video or presentation?

Design for Diversity and Inclusion

Characters that showcase a range of identities and perspectives help audiences feel understood. Consider designing multiple variants of characters to reflect diverse backgrounds, roles, and styles — reinforcing that your content speaks about them rather than just to them.

How to Create Custom Characters With Powtoon

Powtoon’s Character Builder streamlines what used to be a complex design task:

Open Powtoon Studio and go to the Characters tab.
Select “Create Your Character” to start customizing.
Adjust attributes like gender, face shape, hair, eyes, nose, mouth, clothes, and accessories.
Apply brand details by adding your logo and brand colors to clothing or props.
Animate and reuse your character across videos, presentations, GIFs, and learning content. Powtoon

Once created, these characters can express over 30 facial expressions and body poses, making them flexible storytellers in your content. Powtoon

Q&A: Custom Characters and Brand Storytelling

Q – Why should brands use custom animated characters?
Custom characters forge emotional connections, simplify communication, reinforce identity, and make content more memorable compared with generic stock visuals.

Q – How do characters affect engagement?
Characters support storytelling by humanizing messages. Storytelling research shows audiences retain more when information is paired with engaging visuals.

Q – What kinds of characters can you make with Powtoon?
Powtoon’s Character Builder supports diverse character types — professionals, everyday people, mascots, or stylized figures — all customizable to brand guidelines.

Q – Can custom characters be reused?
Yes. Once designed, characters can be stored and reused in multiple projects — maintaining visual consistency across campaigns.

Q – How do characters support inclusivity?
By reflecting diverse identities and audience personas, characters help viewers feel seen, understood, and more connected to the message.

Expert Insight

“Characters are the heart of visual storytelling. They bridge abstract ideas and personal experience, making complex messages feel simple and relatable. When a character feels familiar, viewers listen more closely.” — Powtoon’s Head of Product

Final Thought

Custom animated characters are a strategic asset, not just a creative element. They reinforce brand personality, boost engagement, and help audiences feel seen and understood. Platforms like Powtoon make creating these characters accessible for teams of all sizes — turning ideas into relatable visual stories quickly and consistently.

By aligning character design with both brand identity and audience expectations, you make every piece of content more effective, memorable, and impactful.

Bio
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Shoshi Davis

Shoshi joined Powtoon as a Marketing Assistant. To read more of her stuff, you can find her content on Upwork and Business 2 Community talking all things inbound marketing for SaaS. After only 2 weeks at Powtoon, Shoshi was dubbed by the marketing team as having the superpower of "Unbridled Enthusiasm." So that was pretty cool.