How to Create a Brand’s Personality

The personality of a brand is how it connects emotionally with the consumer. Consumers choose different brands based on what values are associated with the brand, and what values they consider to be important. The personality of a brand is communicated in all ways that the consumer interacts with the company, and must be communicated clearly to employees so that it remains consistent.

A brand’s personality should be chosen based on its target audience. If the company is targeting teenagers, the personality should be causal and cool. If the target audience is parents, the personality should be reassuring and secure. This is because people want the brand to have values that are important to them, or that are important to their friends. People can use brands in public to show that they think the brand’s values are important, and associate themselves with other people that use the brand. By emulating the target audience’s important values, the brand will be able to make a secure emotional connection.

When a brand connects emotionally with its target audience, it inspires consumer loyalty because the consumer feels like they have some kind of relationship with the brand, and they work to preserve that relationship. If a brand treats people in a cold and detached way, then they will not feel obliged to continue buying the brand. However, if a brand treats people like they are friends, then they will want to continue with the brand because the brand will make them feel that it cares about them.

To make the consumers feel the brand cares about them, it must have an identifiable and concrete personality. It cannot be contradictory, because the brand’s personality must be like a person’s personality. A brand that is cheerful, friendly, and energetic gives the consumer a mental image of a person with those characteristics, while a brand that is interesting, calm, and energetic is not. That is because in the first brand, the characteristics go together, and are concrete. Consumers can look at a person and tell if they are cheerful, friendly, or energetic. The second brand is bad because ‘interesting’ is not identifiable, and ‘calm’ and ‘energetic’ are mutually exclusive – it is hard to imagine someone who is calm and energetic at the same time. Consumers will not work to imagine your brand as a person, you must make it obvious to them through advertising, packaging, and other interactions.

After the brand has a personality, companies must adapt the personality to changing trends in the target audience. The brand’s values must remain the same as the target audience’s values, and the brand’s personality must change to keep them engaged with it. If you can keep people emotionally engaged with your brand, they will be loyal to your brand and your company.

Resources:

Great Ideaz provides secure online collaboration workspaces where you can define and adapt your brand’s personality. To see how we can help you, visit greatideaz.com.

Barry Callen’s Manager’s Guide to Marketing, Advertising, and Publicity, Chapter 6 – http://cwlpub.com/images/Callen06.pdf

Melissa Davis’s The Fundamentals of Branding