What Would Jane Austen Do

Using the What Would Jane Austen Do Framework for Brand Messaging

What Would Jane Austen Do as a Creative Exercise

It started as a party game at a friend's house in 2019 and somehow turned into a legitimate strategic tool for a handful of marketing teams. The basic premise is straightforward enough. You take a brand problem, a messaging dilemma, or a positioning question and run it through the lens of what a Jane Austen character would do or say. The goal is to escape the obvious answer and find a more nuanced, human one underneath. I first encountered this while working on a brand refresh for a mid-size skincare company. We were stuck in generic wellness territory. Everything our competitors said sounded the same: clean ingredients, confidence, glow. I threw out the Jane Austen exercise half as a joke during a brainstorm session, and the team actually ran with it. We spent twenty minutes asking what Mrs. Bennet would say about our product versus what Elizabeth Bennet would say. The shift was immediate and tangible. Here is how the framework actually works in practice, not the polished version you see on LinkedIn.

The Core Method

Step one is picking the brand question you need answered. It has to be specific. "How should we position ourselves" is too vague. "How do we explain to a skeptical buyer that our product is worth twice the price of the leading competitor" is usable. The sharper the question, the better the exercise performs. Step two is selecting which Austen character or dynamic applies. This is the part most people skip and it matters. A brand talking to first-time buyers might align with Emma Woodhouse learning humility. A luxury brand might pull from Lady Catherine de Bourgh, though that path requires careful handling because she is a villain in the novels. The character you choose becomes a filter for voice, social awareness, and the kind of truth the brand is willing to tell. Step three is writing the response as that character would. Not in plain prose but in dialogue or internal monologue. The constraint forces specificity. You cannot hide behind corporate ambiguity when you are writing a letter from Mr. Darcy. It either works or it does not.

I have found that the best results come from running multiple character iterations on the same question and then extracting the overlapping insights. Usually two or three characters will land on similar truths even though they arrived there differently. That convergence is what you build the messaging around.

A Real Case Where It Failed Miserably

Last year a fintech startup asked me to run this framework on their onboarding copy. They wanted to sound less corporate. I assigned them the Mr. Collins angle because their sales team had this obsequious, please-like-me quality that was actively repelling customers. The exercise produced some genuinely useful lines about honesty and mutual respect in the customer relationship. But here is the problem: the client loved the Mr. Collins voice too much. They wanted the entire brand to sound like a proud, awkward man requesting a favor. The resulting website copy was functional but deeply off-putting. People bounced. We had to do a full rewrite three weeks later using the Elizabeth Bennet angle instead, which brought back dignity without the groveling. The lesson here is that the framework can amplify a bad instinct if you are not careful. The character you pick needs to be the one who speaks the hard truth, not the one who sounds agreeable. In Austen's world the agreeable characters are usually the ones causing problems.

Common Pitfalls

The biggest mistake I see is treating this as a tone exercise rather than a reasoning exercise. People spend time making sentences sound Elizabethan instead of using Austen's actual method of social observation. The value is not in the accent. The value is in recognizing what characters want, what they pretend to want, and how social pressure shapes their choices. That is the mechanism you are borrowing, not the Regency diction. A second pitfall is applying the framework to problems it cannot solve. It works well for messaging, brand voice, positioning questions, and understanding customer psychology. It does not work for pricing strategy, technical documentation, or anything that requires hard data. Do not force it. I have seen teams waste half a sprint trying to make Austen's social calculus answer a supply chain question.

What Would Jane Austen Do for Your Next Brand Problem

If you want to try this, grab a whiteboard or a shared document. Write your question at the top. List five Austen characters who could plausibly address it. Give each one ten minutes to respond in writing. Then step back and look for the patterns. Remove the wit that does not serve the brand. Keep the observations that feel true. It takes about forty-five minutes for a small team to run through a single question thoroughly. The output is never a finished campaign but it gives you a clearer direction than most focus groups produce, and it costs almost nothing compared to running actual consumer testing. That trade-off is why it stuck around in the few agencies that tried it seriously.

The Honest Limitation

This is not a substitute for customer research. It is a supplement. I have used it alongside survey data and usability testing and the combination works well. Used alone it will give you clever copy that may or may not resonate with your actual audience. The framework reveals what your team believes is true, not necessarily what is true. The Austen angle adds rigor by forcing you to take a position through a specific character's values, but it does not replace validation. There is also the question of whether the framework ages poorly. Some audiences respond to the literary reference. Others find it pretentious. I tend to reserve it for internal strategy work rather than client-facing pitches unless the brand already has a culturally literate positioning. A heavy metal record label doing this exercise would look ridiculous unless they were already playing with that energy intentionally. The downloadable one-page reference card that most people who use this framework carry around is just a checklist of Austen characters with their core motivations attached. You can find various versions online if you search the exact phrase. I keep mine pinned above my desk because after a while the character motivations start happening automatically and you stop needing the reminder.