Character Personalities

Image by DavidErickson via Flickr

Last semester I was enrolled in probably the hardest class of my college career: Marketing 300. While the concepts of marketing are interesting, the way it was presented in this course was only slightly more interesting than doing laundry, and this, paired with the fact that the professor was an incurable braggart made the class nearly impossible.

That being said, there was one single part of the class that actually turned out to be very helpful. One assignment for the course was to take the online VALS survey to discover our marketing personality (of which there are four according to the survey) and in doing this I discovered a truly helpful way to test the characters I was creating. By taking the survey and answering the questions the way I thought my characters would I found a concrete way of making sure my characters remained consistent throughout. The survey results would also give me an interesting character summary to stick to.

So try it out some time! Take one of your characters, go to http://www.strategicbusinessinsights.com/vals/surveynew.shtml, fill out the survey based on the character analysis you've already done, and see what you come up with.