Brand Personality

A brand personality is something to which the consumer can relate, and an effective brand will increase its brand equity by having a consistent set of traits. This is the added-value that a brand gains, aside from its functional benefits. It is also the way a brand speaks and behaves. It means assigning human personality traits/characteristics to a brand so as to achieve differentiation. These characteristics signify brand behavior through both individuals representing the brand (i.e. it’s employees) as well as through advertising, packaging, etc. When brand image or brand identity is expressed in terms of human traits, it is called brand personality.

By definition, brand personality is ‘a set of human characteristics associated with the name of a product, service or company’.

A brand personality is made up of two different elements, and they are as follows:

What a business wants consumers to think about its brand.

What consumers actually THINK about the brand.
 

Now that you are thinking about brand personality, don’t get it confused with brand identity. Personality is the emotional, and human, association to a brand. Identity is the image created and used by a company to relate to consumers. An identity can include all forms of communication and visuals such as logos, colors or fonts.

Identifying and defining the identity and personality of your brand is crucial. Even if you don’t define it, some sort of personality (even of the multiple varieties) will come through. So it’s best to think about it now. Who do you want your brand to be?

Creating a Brand Personality

To all entrepreneurs who wish to create a brand personality strategy, I always recommend that they start of by crafting a lifestyle portfolio for their brands. This requires you to consider your brand & product, and imagine what it would be like if it were a person. This is referred to as personifying a brand.

Whenever personifying your brand, you can think of any questions that may apply to a human being, and use them to determine what kind of feelings your target audience might have towards your brand.

Try to think as follows:

What kind of books would this individual want to have?

What would they dress like?

What music would they like to listen to?

Where would they want to live?

There are several factors that determine how a brand personality is communicated over a certain period of time, and they are:

Product/Service

The brand personality you want to portray can be communicated through your product offerings. If you own a book shop, you may want utilize literary quotes of renowned philosophers – this is because you may be interested in communicating a ‘serious’ and ‘intellectual’ image of your brand personality. Your product’s quality, packaging and use will be strong actors in this regard.

Its Price

Pricing also has an influence on a brand’s personality. For example, Apple’s products are often priced quite high, and this tends to send out a ‘classy’ image.

Its Promotion

Advertising and marketing promotions have a huge effect on how people perceive your brand. There have been several valid arguments that have depicted promotion as being the most important factor in the creation of a specific brand personality.

Its Distribution

The last factor I would like to talk about is the distribution of your product or service. The place where you will be offering your product or service along with the means of distribution are crucial factors that play an important role in formulating your brand’s image.
Apple is famous for its numerous brand personality attributes, such as: stylish, friendly, intuitive, cool, and innovative.

You should try to have a great brand personality so that people will always have positives thoughts when they think of your company. The brand personalities give consumers something with which they can relate, effectively increasing brand awareness and popularity.

Brand Personality Matters

For many years, researchers have been using the concept of brand personality to help describe brands and understand how they relate to consumers. Brand managers and advertising planners have long understood that their brands are differentiated by the way they address their customers. Our analysis goes beyond this to show that emphasizing particular personality traits can strengthen or undermine a brand’s competitive position. If your brand has a particularly strong personality, you may need to adjust its tone of voice to match local cultural dynamics.

Is Brand Personality Important?

For the advertiser, the development and reinforcement of a personality for a brand serves to differentiate the brand from competition.  At a time when many brands are at or near parity in terms of technology (or are perceived to be so by consumers), the only difference between brands is often the personality that is associated with them.  By creating a favorable and liked brand personality, a marketer can set his brand apart, which often enables the marketer to gain market share and/or to charge a higher price (or, at minimum, to avoid losing share to competitive brands that charge lower prices or run frequent consumer or trade promotions).  Further, a brand personality is often unique and non-pre-emptible: while competitors can match your brand’s features and price, they usually cannot duplicate your brand personality (and, if they try to do so, they may end up giving your brand free advertising).

Social Media and Brand Personality

Branding is not just for the real world – but also for the virtual world – particularly in Social Media Marketing.  What message does your brand convey to socially engaged customers?  Companies can no longer afford the luxury of trying to create top-down messaging.

As social media channels have increased, so has the need to communicate simultaneously.  To market effectively, companies need a consistent, compelling brand personality—one that doesn’t mumble.

It is better to think of a brand’s personality image as encompassing all the associations that a consumer has for that brand: all the thoughts, feelings, and imagery that are mentally linked to that brand in the consumer’s memory.

Corporate Brand Personality

Brand personality has been defined as the human characteristics or traits that can be attributed to a brand. Corporate brand personality is a form of brand personality specific to a corporate brand. Unlike a product brand personality that typically relates to consumers and user imagery for a specific product brand, a corporate brand personality can be defined in terms of the human characteristics or traits of the employees of the corporation as a whole. A corporate brand personality will reflect the values, words, and actions of all employees of the corporation. A successful 21st century firm must carefully manage its corporate brand personality. The three core dimensions of corporate brand personality and two traits for each dimension that are crucial for marketplace success are outlined as Passionate and Compassionate (Heart), Creative and Disciplined (Mind) and Agile and Collaborative (Body). These traits have an interactive effect such that the effects of one trait can be enhanced by the existence of another.

In order to build a well-reputed, strong band, you have to take steps to create a positive brand personality, create loyal customers and make your business stand out from others in the same industry. What consumers believe and associate with your brand will go a long way in attaining brand equity, which is the overall value of a brand as a separate asset.

You brand’s consistent personality would reflect both its tangible and intangible elements; and when it is purposefully and carefully managed, it would strengthen trust – which would, in turn, build loyalty as well as a potential for your current customers to refer your products to their friends and family.

If there’s even a single reason to coax your brand personality from inside and outside, it is to solidify the experience you deliver to your current and potential customers.

Some of the most notable brand personalities out there include companies such as Nike, Old Spice, Mail Chimp, Pepsi, Apple, Wrangler and Axe. These personalities have existed for a while and have evolved over time.

What’s the personality of your brand? How did it come to be that way?

Please give us a call at 561-899-9310 to improve your brand’s personality and profits.