How to Develop Your Brand Personality

Whether you know it or not, your brand has a personality. From the images you choose to use in your advertising, to the language used in emails to how employees dress, this develops a personality for your brand. It’s incredibly beneficial to cultivate a brand personality that suits your style of business and customer.

The Importance of a brand personality

Brands with personalities that resonate strongly with their target market enjoy higher customer loyalty and are easier to recognise. Customers can also buy into your brand culture, which encourages them to purchase your products more often. A great example of this is Apple: customers like the brand personality so much that they want to be associated with it. Owning only Apple products says something about their own personality: that they have taste, are affluent and only have the best. They will continue to only buy Apple products in order to cultivate this image.

Taking Control

It’s important to take time to clearly define your brand personality. Think about your products and services, as well as your clients. Often a great brand personality will take into account your niche, what your competitors are doing and what your ideal client looks like. Here are a few personality traits you can think about:

• Formal or funny
• Straight forward or quirky
• Premium or affordable
• Masculine or feminine
• Young or mature
• Reserved or outspoken
• Modern or classic
• Reliable or exciting

Implementation

There are several avenues to go down to effectively implement your brand personality:

1. Developing an operational style guide – this will outline how employees are to represent your business, whether through emails, social media, over the phone or face to face. This would include the type of language to use, tone of voice, style of dress or choice of imagery.
2. Training – using the operational style guide, encouraging your employees to embrace your brand personality is a key step.
3. Branding style guide – ensure that your advertising uses language, typography and imagery that is in line with your brand personality. A good place to start is through your brand style guide.

Your brand personality is an important step in positioning your brand in the market and will help you develop a strong marketing strategy. If you want expert advice in how to achieve a brand personality that will work for your business, we can help! We’ve helped develop branding and operational style guides for a range of businesses like yours.

Want to get your personality up to scratch?

Call the experts!