Branding or building a brand personality is a significant part of the marketing strategy for any business. The more competitive or globalized the market becomes, the more critical it is to develop a brand personality.
Your brand personality reflects in your slogans, advertisements, and content throughout all the marketing channels or social media sites you use. It needs to resonate with what your audience is looking for in solving their problems and fitting their lifestyle.
Successful brands are those that can maintain consistency in their brand personalities. Even when the business expands or introduces product line extensions, the overall theme of the products and services remains the same. That is how the customers continue to identify themselves with the brand.
We will discuss different types of brand personality and brand personality traits, but before that, let’s define what a brand personality is.
What is Your Brand Personality?
According to basic human psychology, human beings innately like to personify themselves. They want to attribute traits, intentions, emotions, feelings, patterns of behavior, and thought processes to themselves and others.
When it comes to brands, humans like to attribute traits and characteristics to them too. That gives rise to brand personalities.
A brand personality is the association of these human traits and characteristics with a specific brand, which its customers can resonate with. In layman’s terms, it refers to the personification of a brand.
A brand personality is built when people use human-like descriptive words, such as trustworthy, straightforward, dishonest, funny, creative, unique, caring, or rebellious.
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We can best understand the concept of a brand personality if we think of a brand as a human being. Think of someone you know, and imagine how they speak and behave in different situations. How do they usually dress up? How do they react and respond to others?
Let’s say, we think of Apple as a person. What comes to mind? What kind of a person would Apple be? He would most likely have impeccable knowledge of all programming languages and code development, and probably a perfect grasp of grammar as well. It would also have a great sense of imagination and creativity. It would always prefer to dress up in premium quality clothes and avoid buying cheaper items for any use. That’s Apple’s brand personality for you!
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Importance of Brand Personality
Merely giving your brand a name, slogan and logo does not build its personality. You need to assign characteristics and properties that your audience can identify with. These characteristics need to be different and unique from the other brands selling similar products or services.
In other words, your brand personality is crucial for differentiating your brand from others. Below are some key factors that reflect why brand personalities are essential.
1. Develop Your Brand Image
Brand image and brand personality are interconnected. One has a direct effect on the other. Your brand personality traits figure out how your products will behave in different situations, while your brand identity specifies the strategies you use to promote your products, resulting in your brand image.
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2. Position Your Offering
Customers perceive similar products sold by different brands in different ways. On some brands, customers place a high perceived value, while others place a relatively low value. Your brand personality guides your customers on how to position your offerings.
3. Develop an Emotional Connection
Associating traits to a brand helps you to build an emotional connection with like-minded people. Your buyer persona would probably be people whose mindset matches that of your brand personality. Hence, defining your brand personality will help you connect with your target customers more accurately, increasing your sales.
4. Ease Communication With Customers
When a brand has a personality, your customers will already be familiar with the products or services you offer. Your customers will already be relating to the traits that are associated with your brand.
Discovering Your Brand Personality
Here are some easy steps you can follow to create or discover your brand personality traits.
1. Consider the Competition
One of the objectives of your brand management strategies should be to stand out from the competition. Therefore, before you determine your brand personality traits, you need to compare the brand personalities of your competitors and product substitutes. Once you know what’s unique about your brand and its offerings, you can move on to the next step.
2. Note Down Your Objectives
You need to have clear and set goals and objectives for building your brand. Your marketing objectives should coincide with your overall business objectives, and your brand personality should also correspond to them. Writing down your main goals will ease out the process and help you stay focused.
3. Draw the Character
Many businesses even go as far as drawing a sketch or vector illustration of their brand to practically visualize the brand as a human and then associate characteristics to it. This exercise is worth a try, no matter how big or small your business is. To take it one step further, you can get a 3D model built for your brand so that you can pretend to have a conversation with it.
4. Have a Conversation With Your Brand
The next step is to have an imaginary conversation with your brand. If you have built a 3D version of your brand, then this step would make more sense. Like those mentioned below, stand in front of your brand model and ask questions about brand personality traits.
- Are you simplistic?
- Can you relate to the people who approach you?
- Do you get easily annoyed when you feel rejected?
- Do you have unique traits in your personality?
- Do you consider yourself elite class?
- Are you witty and can stand a lot of competition?
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5. Be Consistent in the Process
The steps mentioned above are not a one-time process. They need to be repeated periodically in order to keep updating your brand personality. Your marketing content will be derived from your brand personality traits. Thus it is critical for you to be aware of any changes that you might want to bring in your brand personality, which you think will positively affect your sales.
Types and Examples of Brand Personalities
Most of the brand personalities can fit into one of the following five types.
1. Competence
This trait is for brands that are reliable and intelligent and have a successful brand strategy. Customers like such brands because they expect to get the job done. Examples of this trait are Microsoft and Volkswagen.
2. Ruggedness
These are brands that are outdoorsy, thick-skinned, and tough. When people buy products from these brands, they feel powerful. Examples of this brand personality are Harley Davidson and Woodland.
3. Sophistication
These brands are high-class, refined, and charming. It takes time for a company to build a brand personality that’s sophisticated and polished like this. When customers use these brands, they feel elegant and classy. Examples of sophisticated brand personality traits are Armani and Tiffany.
4. Excitement
These are daring and up-to-date brands. Customers feel excited using the trending products from these brands. Advertisements of these brands create a lot of hype among the audience. Examples include Mountain Dew and Virgin Atlantic.
5. Sincerity
This is the genuine, wholesome, and warm brand personality type. Such brands are trustworthy and believable. Customers expect these brands to meet their expectations and keep their promises. Examples are Cadbury and Hallmark.
Build a Brand Website
The perfect way to display, reflect or announce your brand personality is to build a brand website. You can easily create a website for your business on Strikingly, an easy-to-use website building platform that offers plenty of ready-to-use website templates.
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You need to follow the following steps to develop a website on Strikingly all by yourself.
- Register for a free Strikingly account on our landing page.
- Select one of the website templates to use as your ready-made web design.
- Key in the text, upload any pictures, and add videos to your site. Don't forget to write content that reflects our brand personality.
- Integrate your site with any social media profiles or pages you have for your business.
Even if you are running a brick-and-mortar business, you need a website representing your brand personality traits and showcasing your products or services. It is critical for every business to have a good online presence for their brand these days. If you do not have a website, people might not take your brand professionally, and your products might be perceived as having low value as compared to those from your competitors.
We at Strikingly are here to support all entrepreneurs to showcase their brand on the internet by building a high-quality website without writing any code or learning any programming languages. We are happy to see our users grow and be successful in their business initiatives.
