Brand Personality: How to Connect to Customers In a Sea of Sameness
Take a moment to imagine some products for a specific category. Let’s say men’s cologne. What types of brands come to mind first?
Perhaps it’s Dior, or maybe Axe or Old Spice.
Why might we remember these brands more than others?
Everything with branding is contextual and is many layers deep. However, at least one major factor that probably drives you and me to remember and choose those brands is the brand personality for each.
Whether we’re aware of it or not, we have a connection to the character of those brands.
Why do we choose certain brands over others?
Out of the three men’s cologne examples, Axe probably has the least remarkable brand personality (at least on the surface).
It has a high brand salience, a long presence in the market, and a high market share in adjacent categories. And therefore, through that long-term exposure, the brand has built strong links within your memory, along with associations to certain products.
Today, brands act more and more like humans, communicating certain values and personality traits. Whereas in the past, humans could only connect to other humans.
Evolution of corporations into brands.
Before we dive into some brand personality frameworks, I’d like to invite you into my time machine and travel back in time.
Johnathan the cattle/business owner was essentially the business. And his brand was the symbol he used to mark his product. If he exchanged cattle for some other products or services but couldn’t deliver on his side of the deal, the other party could probably take his other possessions, his house, maybe his land. He was personally liable.
That all changed with the creation of something called a limited liability corporation. What’s known as a legal fiction, it’s an entity that can act as if it were a person – take out insurance, buy and sell products and much more.
Over time, somewhere along the lines, language and definitions began to merge and change. Although there are distinctions between a limited liability corporation and a brand, from my observations, many consumers started to associate the word brand with these fictitious entities. And since these could seemingly act the same way that a human would (whilst remaining imaginary), we needed to assign some human characteristics to them for it all to make sense in our fragile minds.
Choosing a Brand Personality wisely
There are at least two prominent frameworks to establish a Brand Personality.
The first model was developed by Jennifer Aaker. Not dissimilar to the Big-5 human personality scale, Jennifer has put forward that brands tend to fall somewhere on the scale of 5 Brand Personality Dimensions.
Sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, and ruggedness.
Another prominent framework can be referred to as the Jungian Archetypes. A set of universally understood characters that carry with them inherent values, symbols, and meaning on an innate level, as popularised by Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist.
While each of the 12 archetypes represents a key human desire or motivation, they are also segmented into 4 quadrants. Stability, Freedom, Mastery, and Belonging.
With the human personality frameworks for example, like the Big-5 or the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator, we often have some ‘dominant’ traits and drivers. But we also tend to exhibit less dominant characteristics (for example very few people are truly extroverted or introverted, with most falling slightly off to the center to either side).
Leveraging a Brand Personality for your business
As I mentioned, a Brand Personality tool (whichever one you choose) is one of many available to brand builders. But they are some of the most effective to create a coherent brand identity.
With a focused brand personality a brand can establish a clear voice, consistent messaging style, and a set of distinctive brand assets (logo, supporting graphics).
Intentionally bringing a specific personality to life, a brand can become the obvious choice for their ideal clients by cutting through all the clutter, sameness, and noise of their market category.
Because certain brands are intentional with aligning to a specific brand personality, we can connect to them on an intrinsic level (just like we connect with similar-minded humans). And we bring those brands into our world (by purchasing their products and services) to reinforce our own identity.
How can you discover your Brand Personality?
So the big question is, how do you know how to show up? What Brand Personality is right for your business?
Answering some of these questions can also help:
- Do you feel that your product or service is innovative in terms of what it’s bringing to the market and customers, or is it more about providing a reliable outcome?
- Which would your customers value more: an honest, down-to-earth approach or a sense of exclusivity and glamour?
- Which does your business value more: learning from mistakes and overcoming challenges in continuously new ways or reliable expertise, quality and confidence?
- How do you not want your brand to be perceived (how not to show up can help you establish how you should): uptight, domineering, experimental, goofy, fake, daring?