Why Brands Are Starting to Have Their Own "Persona"

What does it actually feel like for a brand to truly possess its own "persona"?

It isn't just an endorser appearing in a single campaign, nor a mascot endlessly slapped onto marketing collateral.

It should have its own personality, speak, make choices, and consistently appear in content—to the point where consumers actively choose to keep watching the brand simply because they like this character.

The Chinese market already has very mature reference cases.

Mixue's "Snow King" (雪王) is no longer just a white mascot statue standing outside store doors. The brand has built an entire ecosystem around it: producing animated series such as Snow King's Arrival and Snow King's Fantastic Shazhou, launching short dramas like Snow King's Time-Travel Diary and Snow King Selling Coffee in Ancient Times, entering the variety show IP China Tour in 2025, and distributing multilingual versions of Snow King's Arrival (in English, French, Portuguese, etc.) globally in 2025.

In its public disclosures, Mixue explicitly defined "Snow King" as a key, long-term IP asset, continuously reinforcing the character through animation, short dramas, theme music, offline events, and global content.

This operates on a fundamentally different logic from the traditional approach of "hiring a celebrity spokesperson for three months."

The brand isn't renting someone else's influence.

The brand is cultivating a "persona" of its own.

Why Do Brands Increasingly Want Their Own "Persona"?

In the past, the most common way for brands to build a humanized relationship with consumers was by borrowing the reach of celebrities and key opinion leaders (KOLs).

Celebrities bring inherent fame; KOLs bring dedicated followers and platform affinity. Through sponsorships and endorsements, brands temporarily attach that existing influence to themselves.

This model remains vital and will not disappear.

However, it possesses a natural boundary:

The core assets—the persona, follower relationship, and messaging rhythm—do not truly belong to the brand.

Celebrity schedules, public image, and media environments shift; influencers have their own content pacing and commercial boundaries. Once a contract ends, the brand usually has to purchase the relationship all over again.

The game-changing shift in the AI era is that brands can now, for the first time, build a primary messaging entity that permanently belongs to them.

It can be a photorealistic digital human, a non-human character like Snow King, an independent IP derived from a celebrity's cultural assets, or a virtual persona created entirely from scratch by the brand.

This is why we prefer to interpret the concept of a "brand digital human" in a broader context:

It is not just an AI face; it is a long-term operational brand persona asset.

From Snow King to AI Digital Humans: What Changed Isn't the "Presence of a Character," but "Can the Character Work Continuously?"

Why does Snow King deserve to be highlighted before diving into AI digital humans?

Because it proves a crucial point:

What consumers are truly willing to accept in the long run is not a figure that is "technically realistic," but a character with personality, content, and a real relationship with them.

Snow King can star in animations, produce short dramas, join variety shows, participate in local urban culture, co-brand with other IPs, and convey core messages during key brand milestones.

When Mixue prepared for its IPO in 2025, Snow King appeared in various public communications; entering 2026, the brand continued to push Snow King into interactive content and cross-brand activations.

This demonstrates that the true value of a brand persona asset lies not in how it looks, but in:

• Whether it can consistently speak;
• Whether it can enter different content formats;
• Whether consumers know "how it would react";
• Whether it can maintain the same underlying personality logic years down the road.

And generative AI is dramatically lowering the barrier to this long-term content production pipeline.

Why Does AI Make Having Your Own Persona More Realistic?

In the past, operating a brand character long-term was a heavy content engineering task.

Brands had to continuously fund:

• Character design;
• Animation production;
• Voiceovers;
• Scriptwriting;
• Expression and motion design;
• Social media content;
• Multilingual versions;
• Live streaming or interactive development.

This is why companies that successfully built brand IPs in the past typically required immense content resources and sustained long-term budgets.

Generative AI changes this fundamental production structure.

Now, a fixed character can generate images, videos, audio, and interactive content at a much higher frequency. The same character can seamlessly cross short video, live streaming, customer service, advertisements, official websites, and overseas markets. Existing characters can even be connected to knowledge bases and real-time dialogue systems.

Jingdong's public JoyAI digital human products already cover scenarios like live streaming and short video, providing custom brand digital human development, real-time interactivity, and multi-industry character libraries. Jingdong officially positions it as a marketing and sales growth engine rather than merely a virtual showcase of technology.

This transition carries significant symbolic meaning.

The core value of digital humans is shifting from:

"Creating a hyper-realistic virtual face"

To:

"Enabling this character to undertake long-term brand expression and commercial tasks."

Celebrities and KOLs Will Not Disappear, but Their Weight in Brand Content May Be Reallocated

"Brands owning their own personas" does not mean celebrities and KOLs will be replaced by AI.

In reality, celebrities and human influencers still hold distinct advantages in trust, social authority, and cultural consensus.

A 2026 meta-analysis published in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science—covering 210 experiments and 643 effect sizes regarding virtual influencers—found that while virtual influencers offer stronger novelty and can approach human levels of user engagement, they overall remain weaker than human influencers in trustworthiness, brand attitude, and behavioral intent.

This means brands cannot simply conclude:

"Virtual humans will be cheaper in the future, so we don't need real people anymore."

What is far more likely to happen is a reallocation of content roles.

In the past:

Celebrities/KOLs were the primary messaging entity, and brands produced content around them.

In the future, the dynamic will increasingly become:

The brand's owned digital persona handles daily, continuous, and reusable expression; celebrities and KOLs handle campaign amplification, social endorsement, and traffic acceleration.

This is the key difference between "replacement" and a "combined strategy."

Celebrities remain crucial.

However, brands no longer want all of their persona-driven communication to depend entirely on third parties.

An International Case: Why KFC Turned the Colonel into an Interactive Digital Character

Global markets provide another intriguing reference point.

KFC did not create an unfamiliar AI character from scratch; instead, it digitized Colonel Sanders—an entity that already belonged to the brand.

In the KFC Re:Store project created by Dentsu Creative China, a virtual Colonel Sanders became an interactive NPC in QQ's virtual world. Users could chat with him, interact, and experience various activities within the virtual store.

Public case study data showed that within 5 weeks of launch, the virtual space attracted 19 million visitors, generating approximately 850 million conversations with the virtual Colonel.

The most notable aspect of this case is not the "metaverse" gimmick itself.

It is that:

The brand's existing persona asset was upgraded into a digital character capable of interacting, providing service, and driving commercial action.

This represents a far more pragmatic path for mature brands—not creating a stranger from scratch, but putting existing brand personas to "work."

Why Do Growth Brands Especially Need Their Own Persona?

For growth brands currently expanding their market presence, hiring celebrities and KOLs often represents an expensive and ongoing traffic cost.

While these investments hold value, brands inevitably face a practical dilemma:

If every campaign relies on external figures, when will the brand accumulate its own media assets?

In this context, the greatest value of an owned persona asset is not merely "saving endorsement fees."

It allows every unit of content investment to continuously compound.

A well-built brand digital human, virtual IP, or character can be reused across future product launches, campaign milestones, social media channels, live streams, customer service, and overseas content.

For growth brands, it functions essentially as long-term content infrastructure.

Yet the primary challenge for such brands is equally obvious:

Having the tools does not equal having the capability to nurture a living persona.

A digital human requires much more than just a generative model.

It requires at minimum:

• A clear persona;
• Brand voice and language;
• Content themes;
• Visual rules;
• Motion and voice consistency;
• Ongoing narrative arc or content mechanisms;
• Multi-platform operations;
• Technical stability;
• Copyright and compliance boundaries.

Therefore, what growth brands need is rarely buying an off-the-shelf digital human tool; rather, they need to collaborate with creative teams and AI technology partners to build the character definition and content framework together.

What Mature Brands Need Is Not "Cheapness," but Stability, Trust, and Governance

For mature brands, the underlying logic is completely different.

They rarely lack celebrity resources or exposure.

What they care about far more is:

• Does this persona legally belong to the brand?
• Can it be consistently deployed across global markets?
• Does it remain consistent across different content forms?
• Are there clear boundaries for its knowledge and expression?
• Are voice, likeness, and character assets fully controllable?
• How is AI content labeled?
• Does it comply with local regulations across different regional markets?

In other words, the true reason mature brands deploy digital humans is not to lower single-campaign production costs, but to build a brand persona asset that can be governed for the long term.

This explains why truly valuable digital human projects moving forward will rarely be about "purchasing a SaaS template."

It resembles a joint engineering initiative:

Brand Strategy + Creative Direction + Character Design + Content Systems + AI Tech + Data Governance + Regulatory Compliance.

The True Challenge Isn't "Creating the Persona," but Keeping It from Drifting Over Time

AI has made "creating a character" effortless.

The real difficulty lies in:

Is the character in the 100th piece of content still the same entity as in the 1st piece of content?

This encompasses both visual consistency and persona consistency.

A character cannot be gentle today, sharp-tongued tomorrow, and suddenly express things completely out of line with the brand the day after.

Consequently, the core engineering problem of brand digital humans inevitably pivots from "generation quality" to "persona governance."

This is a challenge FansAI frequently navigates across character-driven content projects.

FansAI does not simplify projects like Chou Chou (周同学), Momcozy BIG HUGS, or MINISO YOYO as generic "brand digital human projects." However, all of these projects involve the foundational capabilities that brand digital humans must address in the future: character consistency, worldbuilding, behavioral boundaries, cross-media expression, and long-term asset reuse.

For example, in the Chou Chou project, the core challenge was not making a static character move, but enabling a character deeply linked to a celebrity's cultural assets to gradually establish its own messaging boundaries, city-specific content, and long-term worldview.

In the Momcozy × BIG HUGS project, a 2D IP character entered realistic Christmas scenes, replacing human actors as the primary story agent. The content needed to simultaneously maintain 2D character traits, realistic spatial relationships, and consistent brand tone.

MINISO YOYO further demonstrated that when owned brand characters enter special overseas media formats, they must not only look identical but also execute actions and use props according to their specific character settings, while maintaining strict spatial and behavioral logic during multi-character interactions.

These projects do not mean "FansAI has built a standard turnkey digital human platform for every brand."

Rather, they prove a deeper truth:

If a brand wishes to possess a long-term owned character, technology must ultimately serve persona stability rather than just a single generation run.

Why Do Brand Digital Humans Increasingly Require Creative and AI Tech Companies to Work Together?

Digital humans are evolving from a "tech procurement" task into a "content system construction" challenge.

Technology teams can solve:

• Character generation;
• Voice synthesis;
• Motion generation;
• Dialogue systems;
• Multilingual translation;
• Real-time driving.

However, technology alone cannot answer:

• Why does this persona exist?
• What does it say?
• Which part of the brand does it represent?
• Why should consumers care?
• How are roles divided between this persona, celebrities, KOLs, and official brand accounts?

Conversely, traditional creative agencies can define brand expression, but may lack the technical capabilities to manage generative models, character consistency, real-time interactivity, and long-term asset reuse over time.

Therefore, as brand digital humans enter long-term operational phases, the most effective organizational model will likely be:

The brand owns strategy and asset rights, the creative team defines persona and content, and the AI technology team ensures the persona operates stably.

This transition marks how brand digital humans evolve from a "marketing gimmick" into "brand content infrastructure."

Beyond 2026, Brand Digital Humans Must Answer One Question: Do Consumers Know It's AI?

As brand digital humans enter live streaming, short video, and interactive channels at scale, transparency is no longer merely an ethical choice—it is becoming an explicit legal rule.

China's Measures for the Labeling of Artificial Intelligence Generated and Synthesized Content took effect on September 1, 2025, establishing explicit and implicit labeling requirements for AI-generated text, image, audio, video, and virtual scenes, while requiring users and platforms to declare and apply labels during publication.

Similarly, Article 50 transparency obligations under the EU AI Act apply as of August 2, 2026. Explicit disclosure and labeling are mandated for AI systems directly interacting with natural persons, AI-generated synthetic content, and specific deepfake scenarios.

This implies that "control" over brand digital humans must now encompass:

• Technical control;
• Persona control;
• Content control;
• Asset right control;
• Identity transparency.

Brands cannot expect digital humans to appear indistinguishable from real humans while simultaneously hoping consumers never discover they are AI.

A digital persona capable of building genuine long-term trust is one that communicates its nature transparently.

Is a Brand Digital Human Right for Every Company?

Not necessarily.

If a brand only requires short-term promotional campaigns, lacks continuous content channels, and has no stable brand persona positioning, creating a digital human will likely yield little more than an idle asset.

However, if a brand exhibits the following needs, the value of a digital persona rises significantly:

• High-frequency social media content output;
• Brand IP operations;
• Long-term live streaming or customer service;
• Multilingual and global market content;
• Youth-oriented consumer communication;
• Daily brand messaging beyond celebrities/KOLs;
• The intent to accumulate reusable brand content assets.

Thus, the first question a brand should ask is not:

"How much does a digital human cost right now?"

But rather:

"Over the next three years, do we have a body of content that needs to be continuously expressed by the 'same persona'?"

If the answer is yes, a digital human ceases to be a mere technology choice.

It becomes a core brand asset strategy.

Conclusion: AI Makes "Owning a Persona" Easy, but Making People Love It Remains Hard

AI will continue to lower the production barrier for digital humans.

Generating a face, synthesizing a voice, scripting interactive dialogue, and running automated live streams will become progressively easier.

However, consumers will not automatically love a character simply because it is powered by AI.

Digital brand personas that truly endure still depend on:

Personality, content, emotional connection, memory, and long-term consistency.

Snow King succeeded not because it is a white snowman character,

But because the brand continuously brought it to life within consumers' culture and content ecosystem.

The same holds true for future brand digital humans.

AI makes it easy for brands to possess "their own persona," but the real challenge remains making that persona worthy of long-term love.