Customers take brand personality into account when they decide where to shop, who to engage with, and more. It’s like dating… sort of. Potential buyers will pick out characteristics of a brand, elements they connect with, and more. If they just don’t vibe with you, they’ll move on to the next option.
If you want to build an awesome brand personality to connect better with your audience, you’re in the right place. We’ll explain what brand personality is, why it matters, and share tips to build a strong brand persona.
What Is Brand Personality?
Your brand personality is the humane elements or characteristics that you align your brand with. Instead of a clean, corporate, detached, and impersonal feel, brand personality is all about connection. It’s about who your brand would be if they were a person; what their personality would be like.
Brand personality includes choices in images, visual design, text and captions, font, language, and more. All these elements come together to create a memorable and intentional experience for the audience.
Consider Nike’s brand persona, for example. The sportswear and clothing brand has one of the most cohesive brand identities out there. The statement swoosh and font are memorable and distinct, and together with the ‘Just Do It’ slogan, they imply movement and motivation.
This is what Nike is all about and this is clear in their campaigns. Their chosen ambassadors, visuals, and language all integrate to create a personality that is active, inspirational, passionate, sporty, socially connected, and brave.
Why Is Brand Personality Important?
The choices you make for your brand personality contribute to and reflect how potential customers and the world view your brand. They also guide them on how they should engage with you and what they can expect from your company.
The human characteristics that you choose to define your brand personality are what make you unique. They set you apart from others offering the same product or service.
These are important factors in building emotional investment in your brand. They’re also key to customer loyalty, brand recall, and familiarity.
5 Tips For Building A Strong Brand Personality
Here are some tips for how to build your brand personality:
Make Your Audience Your Focus
All good business branding places the customer as the focus. Branding is all about how your customer perceives you and how you present your business to them.
In the same light, brand personality also stems from this relationship with your customers.
Always think about your audience’s preferences, desires, and expectations. Observe and research how they behave with your brand and brands similar to yours.
Take the time to thoroughly map out your customer profile, including:
- Spending patterns
- Values
- Preferences
- Customer journeys
- Search engine behavior
- Financial profile
- Digital presence
Understanding your customer is the first step to building a brand personality that attracts the buyers you want. Your personality should speak to people who fit that customer profile.
It can also speak to those who want to fit into that profile, who spend money on your brand to get them into a particular status. This is true for luxury brands, but it can also be true for service providers that give customers exclusive experiences.
Set Your Core Values
Values and principles, as with human beings, define who you are and what you stand for as a brand. Creating a value system is all about asking yourself what matters to your organization. What are the important things your brand cannot sway from?
Again, a good way to get to your core values is to center your audience. What is important or valuable to your audience and the people that support you should matter to you.
More and more people seek to support brands that reflect core values that they believe in – whether it be sustainability, eco-consciousness, feminism, etc.
When you have these values outlined, you can write them out as a value statement that everybody in your team abides by.
Establish A Brand Style Guide
A brand mood board and style guide is a good way to keep your branding cohesive and constant. You have many people working on your team. And new people come in as others leave. It can be tough to maintain your brand persona with changing faces and many hands in the pot.
If you have a new social media manager, for example, they may not fully understand how to represent the brand online in the beginning.
To avoid sending mixed messages and losing your brand persona, create a brand style guide. Your guide should include all the things that make up your personality. With human beings, this includes dress style, aesthetics, voice, personality types, values, etc. The same goes for your brand.
Some of the things you should have in your style guide are:
- A color palette
- Language and tone
- Your brand voice
- Customer profiles
- Font choices
- Visual language
- Logos
- Engagement or marketing response templates
Your style guide is a tool that creates clarity and consistency in your branding. Anyone in your team can refer to it when creating new content to make sure it aligns with your brand personality.
Stay Consistent
A strong brand personality is all about continuity. You can’t wake up one morning and completely shift your brand from a fun, casual personality to a formal, corporate tone. Not unless you want your customers to view you as that odd, hot-and-cold person they just don’t get.
Inconsistency can confuse and frustrate your audience. Ultimately, it makes them feel like you’re unreliable and untrustworthy. Customers cannot build loyalty or familiarity with a volatile brand.
Your style guide and value statement are tools that can maintain consistent brand messaging. Staying consistent is what will keep your customers around.
Adjust Carefully
It sounds like the opposite of what we just said about consistency, but you may have to adjust your brand personality as you go. This doesn’t mean a complete and abrupt overhaul. It just means that building your ideal brand personality will take experimentation and time.
Your brand’s values will change as your customers do, for example. Style guides may need adaptation as time passes. Consistency doesn’t equal outdated and irrelevant.
Instead, you should constantly reflect on your branding and research how your customers receive it. Where necessary, make small but intentional changes. Even brands are allowed to evolve.
Conclusion
Good branding is the key to good business. Without it, your marketing suffers and so do your reputation and customer relationships.
A brand personality is essential to building connections with buyers on a human level. It builds emotional investment, reflects your values, and tells your audience who you are.
When you build a reliable and consistent persona, you set the foundation for a trusting and loyal relationship. Keep it steady and it could help you find and keep your customers for life.
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