Seven Steps To Creating The Perfect Brand Persona

Yael Klass is the Vice President of Corporate Marketing at Similarweb.

Personality has been defined as the “complex of characteristics that distinguishes an individual or a nation or group.” But a crucial component is missing from that definition—companies should also be included. Brand personalities guide your strategy, content and design. They affect how you speak to employees and customers and determine the feeling prospects get when interacting with your business. Creating this identity builds trust, manages expectations and creates loyal relationships that impact your business’s success. If you’re struggling to define yours or want to take your company’s personality to the next level, I’m sharing seven effective steps to do so.

1. Determine what your brand is and is not.

What exactly is branding? Alina Wheeler said it best: “Branding is a disciplined process to build awareness and extend customer loyalty. It is about seizing every opportunity to express why people should choose one brand over another.”

Your brand isn’t your name, website or product. It’s the personality traits or word associations people make about your business, including:

• Sincerity: honest, wholesome, down-to-earth.

• Excitement: lively, imaginative, daring.

• Competence: reliable, hard-working, successful.

• Sophistication: luxurious, high-end, charming.

• Ruggedness: youth, unconventional, adventurous.

Your brand is not your corporate identity and goes beyond the individual components we associate with a company. It’s the value beyond the sum of its parts.

2. Differentiate branding from marketing.

Branding shapes who your company is. Marketing promotes that.

Branding is the why. Why does your company exist? What are you trying to achieve? How do customers describe your business?

Marketing is how you convey that message via specific tactics like pay-per-click (PPC) ads, emails or blogs. While marketing draws attention to your business, your brand maintains it.

For example, your business may run a targeted campaign to generate leads. How you devise the story, the visual and content language and the feeling prospects get (inspired, funny, etc.) is your brand.

3. Pick personality traits that define your brand.

The most prominent companies in the world have strong brand identities.

Think Apple, Amazon and Google. (Full disclosure: Apple, Amazon and Google are clients of my company.) There’s a reason they’ve become household names worth billions, and it’s not only because of their products.

They cater to Jung’s 12 archetypes: As Mahnoor Sheikh writes, “humans have one dominant trait that leads to typical behavioral patterns, desires, values, and motivations. These typical ‘archetypes’ can also be applied to brands, and businesses can use them to create brand personalities that connect with their target audience on a personal and emotional level.”

Is your brand a service (Caregiver) or innovation (Creator)? Maybe you convey freedom (Explorer), safety (Innocent) or understanding (Sage). Or do you represent power (Magician), a hero (Master) or liberation (Outlaw)?

Ask your team to choose characteristics they associate with your company without revealing the corresponding archetype. You’ll get an unbiased overview. From there, review the collateral you’ve created and see if the archetype would realistically communicate in that way. This will show if the brand you want is, in fact, the brand you’ve expressed so far.

4. Choose colors wisely.

Did you know that colors elicit specific emotions, affect our behavior and impact whether your brand resonates with customers? Up to 90% of their snap decisions are based on color—so you’ve got a convincing reason to be mindful of color choices.

If your brand already has colors set in stone, consider other ways to use different ones in internal and external materials outside of the logo and webpages to evoke certain emotions.

Greens are typically associated with health, nature or wealth; reds with energy, passion or appetite; blues with peace and reliability. Purple can make people feel sophisticated or nostalgic, whereas orange can suggest playfulness and exuberance.

5. Enlist a mascot.

Sometimes mascots can drive more impact than products. Think the Michelin Man, Pillsbury Doughboy or Geico Gecko. (Full disclosure: Michelin and Geico are clients of my company.)

Some mascots are genius forms of advertising and help companies achieve and maintain fame. People recognize them, even if they’re not consumers of that product, spreading awareness.

If you’re not interested in pursuing a traditional mascot, you can decide on other guidelines for representation—for example, illustration versus photos. What kind of people do you use to showcase your brand? Are there symbols that can be combined with images to express something similar to a mascot? Get creative.

6. Define your tone.

There’s a difference between voice and tone. Voice is static. It identifies your brand by the way you sound and the kinds of words you use. On the other hand, tone changes depending on who you’re speaking to and the mood of the conversation.

Pretend your brand is a person. Give them a name and go through an exercise of creating their LinkedIn profile. If I did that for my company, the byline would read, “I’m a creative data-digger curious about every facet of the digital world.” I’d highlight skills such as marketing, advertising, research, analytics and business hacks.

Construct your brand persona and hone the appropriate voice through this exercise. Remember that the tone of your brand will change depending on if you’re talking to investors, customers, prospects, partners, etc.

7. Lastly, create your key messages and go!

Now it’s time to craft key messages to use in brand communication.

I recommend starting with “power words” you want to seed into your brand messaging. Then list out concepts you want to grow, reduce and remove to best align with your newfound identity.

Perhaps you want to ensure people connect your brand to the concept of “growth,” so you’d want that as a power word.

Make the concepts personal, short and straightforward; present your features as a solution and use analogies or comparisons when possible.

Keep working on your brand persona.

Overall, your brand persona is about selling the idea that makes your business unique and drives all your business decisions.

Once you develop the secret sauce, your brand persona will speak for itself. But that doesn’t mean you don’t need to come back and revise. At the bare minimum, revisit your persona once a year to ensure its traits, tone and power words align with your company’s vision and mission.

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