What is your Brand Personality?
Looking to create the best brand possible for your business? Branding is sooo important, and this article from my friends at Blue Summit Supplies really hits the spot...check it out below.
Developing Your Brand Personality
"Whether you like it or not, the public is developing opinions about your brand, and it’s up to you to guide your audience with intentional, consistent, and effective branding. In this post, we’ll discuss the importance of brand personality and brand positioning, including what the difference is and how to develop an effective strategy for your business.
A brand personality makes your business seem more human and better enables you to communicate with customers authentically. Audiences want the brands they follow to display consistent human emotions and traits that they can identify with and relate to. Some customers want brands to share their sense of humor, whereas others want brands to share their ideals. In other words, customers want to make brands their friends—someone who understands and sees them.
Any deviation from your brand personality will trigger the “inauthentic” alarms in your audience’s head, exposing your brand as fraudulent. It’s essentially the same as learning that a trusted friend has been lying to you about an important aspect of their personal life.
What is Your Brand Like as a Person?
Begin thinking about your brand as a person. How would you describe your brand if it was someone you knew? What are they like? How do they make people feel? What type of people do they attract?
List adjectives to describe who your brand is so that you can portray this personality in every interaction and audience touchpoint. For example, Blue Summit is innovative, bold, resourceful, and playful.
Adjective Ideas:
- Fun
- Daring
- Calm
- Adaptable
- Engaging
- Humorous
- Warm
- Caring
- Healthy
- Witty
- Rugged
- Sexy
- Rebellious
- Adventurous
- Luxurious
- Dependable
- Imaginative
- Whimsical
- Traditional
- Modern
Set clear guidelines around your brand personality based on adjectives, your brand values, target audience, and offering. Everyone in your company should live and breathe this personality. Every customer interaction, online communication, or marketing campaign needs to maintain a clear and consistent brand personality. How does your brand sound when it speaks?
Developing a clear style guide that goes beyond visual elements to include notes about your brand voice, word choice, style, etc., will help your team stay on the same page as they interact with customers as your brand.
Developing a Brand Positioning Strategy
Brand positioning refers to where you are placed within your industry or market. How is your brand positioned compared to competitors? This positioning sometimes occurs naturally, while other times, businesses need to be more intentional about where they are positioned.
Coca-Cola, for example, became a brand leader by developing a first-of-its-kind original product. This sets it apart from competitors and allows the brand to dictate price, product expectations, and industry standards.
Whether you have a strategy or not, your audience is positioning your brand in comparison to other options on the market. It is in a business’s best interest to develop a market positioning strategy in order to guide public perception. This way, all of your sales, marketing, and branding decisions are aligned with your position (or hopeful position) in the market.
The first step to establishing a brand positioning strategy is to determine who each of your competitors is. Once you understand who you are competing with, you can assess their products or services compared to your own. What do they do well? Why might a customer choose them over you? Don’t be afraid to ask around. If you lose a customer, ask them why. Why did they choose another brand over yours? Dig into reviews, online forums, sales data, and customer service interaction to understand where your brand currently fits compared to competitor brands.
To keep reading more about brand positioning, click here or visit blusummitsupplies.com where we publish new career-building resources every week that include free downloads, tools, and tips to make your job easier – and more fun.
And if you're looking for help in actually creating your Brand Personality, click here to book your Free M.A.P. Marketing Strategy Session.
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