5 Reasons Why You Should Strengthen Your Brand Personality
If your brand was a person, who would your brand be? Friendly, warm, inspiring, confident, understanding?
Since every brand will interact with customers at one point, how do you imagine your brand will communicate with them? Will your brand convey a friendly, warm, inspiring persona? Or will your brand's personality be more outgoing and adventurous?
Brand personality is the unique set of characteristics and behavioral traits that are solely associated with your brand and define it.
Like a person, a brand talks and looks a certain way through its marketing materials, such as social media ads, brochures, and proposals. When you create an advertisement for social media or design a brochure, you favor certain pictures over others or prefer a specific writing style for your copy. All of these decisions combined contribute to your brand personality, making it approachable and likable for your customers and, at the same time, distinguishable from your competitors.
Take The North Face as an example. Although competing in a similar outdoor clothing market, The North Face has a different brand personality than Patagonia, Osprey, or Columbia, each appealing to its loyal fans.
Just like a person trying to connect with others, customers look for brands that resonate with them and are relatable and approachable.
Similar to people, brands derive their identifying characteristics from what they value most and how they think and feel about specific issues. Depending on the level of authenticity and coherence of these traits, your brand personality will strengthen or weaken, equating to a stronger or weaker brand.
5 Reasons Why You Should Strengthen Your Brand Personality
Facilitate customer acquisition. A strong brand personality does the selling for you. It draws in customers who can relate to your brand. Think of BMW's ultimate driving machine. If you find the BMW brand appealing and look for a new car, you will undoubtedly visit a BMW dealer and test drive one of their vehicles. That's how powerful the BMW brand is.
Improve customer loyalty. Customers who already own one or multiple products from you and are happy with them will likely buy another product. These repeat customers are loyal to your brand and favor it over your competitors. Think of customers purchasing products from Apple, Lululemon, REI, and other strong brands.
Strengthen competitive differentiation. Since many products and services are objectively very similar, your brand personality will be a key factor to set them apart. For that to work, foster an authentic and consistent brand personality that resonates with your customers.
Drive brand awareness. Promoting your brand through ads on social media or a weekly newsletter makes it more familiar, recognizable, and memorable to its target customers, increasing brand awareness. However, there is a long way before awareness turns into preference.
Increase brand equity. An authentic and consistent brand can be very valuable for your company.
If customers are willing to pay a premium for your branded products and services compared to generic equivalents, your brand has positive brand equity.
In that case, your business could sustainably generate higher profit margins from your products and services than competitors with weaker brands.
Investing in your brand personality could lead to a much stronger brand, increasing the value premium customers are ready to pay for your products and services - a pretty nice return on your investment.
If Your Brand Was a Person, Who Would Your Brand Be?
Take some time to answer this question since your answer influences many downstream decisions in brand design (logo, colors, typography, illustrations, and photography) and messaging.
Getting the definition of your brand personality directionally right could significantly increase the return on your investment.
It will also help ensure that your marketing efforts focus on authenticity and coherence, two crucial success factors contributing to a strong brand.
