The Importance Of A Brand Personality

Who are you? What do you do? And most importantly, why should any potential customer care?

A brand’s personality is what makes people love (or hate) them.

It’s not just your logo, or your company tagline – it’s you, your team, what you offer, how you work and what you love. Ultimately, it’s what attracts clients to your business.

Brands have their own personality traits. The personification of a brand that evokes certain emotions in its customers is what builds brand equity. Brand personality is not applicable to just large corporations; this branding strategy can help small businesses and startups as well.

When it comes to smaller business, brand personality isn’t just important, it’s everything! Now, if you’re feeling doubtful about this big, sweeping statement hear me out as I share the main reasons why you need to create a brand personality for your business.

Standing Out From The Crowd

A distinct brand personality can make your brand appear to stand apart from your competition.

It’s a tough world out there. Competition is fierce and simply telling your potential customers what you do doesn’t help them work out whether they should pick you. What does help them decide is the look, feel and experience of talking to you, viewing your website and being part of your sales funnel. And that’s where your brand personality will help you to shine.

Get Your Message Across

Your favourite brands invoke personal feelings of recognition and familiarity, warmth and comfort. This might be the reason you prefer one brand over another. When launching a new product, marketers can expand their reach by assigning personality traits that the audience can connect with.

If you’re promoting a new brand, you need to think carefully about the personality you want to portray. The right balance and the right traits make your brand feel uniquely like YOUR brand. This creates a framework for promotional materials, products and the experience you create, that fits with your desired personality.

For existing businesses you’ll need to check if the brand personality you have matches what your customers think about you. The two can potentially be very different! Research into your buyer personas can be truly revealing.

Forming A Lasting Relationship

You’ve heard the phrase ‘people buy from people’, right? Put simply, a customer is more likely to purchase from someone they like or can relate to. Brand personality is basically the same thing, but on a larger scale.

A company that really nailed this is Apple.

They differentiated their Mac from a PC with the help of distinct personality traits in their television ads. The young and stylish Mac was instantly more relatable than the older and stuffier PC. This enabled consumers to decide which brand they wanted to buy, depending on the traits they wanted to embody for themselves. Consistent personality traits help consumers establish a relationship with a brand as they identify with the personality and not just the product. When you know what your brand personality is you feel confident, comfortable and consistent in your own style, ensuring the lasting loyalty of your customers.

Setting a distinct personality helps shape your brand: the behaviour of your team, the look and feel of your promotional work, product development and the whole overall brand experience. Review your competitor brands too as part of your annual competitor analysis, as it’s good business sense to know what they’re up to, too!

It’s easy to say, but thinking about what your personality is needs careful thought. It also needs to be truthful, so how you act and behave matches up to the brand experience. In having a personality though you’ll at least have something to judge decisions, your promotional work and even your people by.

So, work out how to distil the bits that resonate with your customers and embed this into your marketing messages as, after all, it’s all about the right fit. Simple!