Brand Identity and Personality are distinct but closely related. Your brand identity is the visual image you create to communicate with your clients, including your logo, color scheme, or other repeating visual details. It is anything that your client (or potential client) sees that allows them to visually identify your business as distinct from your competition. Your brand personality is the emotional association that a client (or potential client) experiences when they think of your brand or see your logo. Personality helps create the emotions your client (or potential client) feels when they think of your brand or see your logo, as if they are thinking of a person rather than just a brand.
Knowing your brand personality can help determine how you communicate with your clients and how your business stands out in the community, especially compared to your competitors. Brand identity makes you recognizable. Brand personality makes you relatable.
Having a brand personality ensures that your communications will all look and feel like they are coming from the same place. It also allows you to be a storyteller and to become a business that people want to get to know better. People will always be more eager to speak about “a someone” rather than “a something”. By giving your brand a personality that comes across as more authentic in communications, you’ll get your clients excited and they’ll want to talk about you with their family and friends.
But how do you figure out what your brand personality is? Here are a few questions to consider when creating (or discovering) your brand personality.
- Describe your business or brand with one adjective. Is it luxurious, trendy, hip, upscale, contemporary, etc?
- What is the spirit of your brand? If you had to define the essence of your business in one word, what would you choose?
- If your brand was a person, how would you describe him/her?
- Who is your audience?
- How do you want people to feel about your brand?
These questions should start to give you an idea about what the personality of your brand looks like. From there you can start to craft a personality to represent your brand.
Once you have created your brand personality, now is the time to cultivate it through your social media interactions, your blog, and your email marketing. It is a powerful social media tool for creating a relationship with your clients and for attracting the type of clients you really want. Don’t forget that brand personality is about the emotional association your clients feel when they see your logo or think about your brand. It is more about fostering a relationship with your clients rather than them just being able to identify your logo.
By having a strong brand personality, your clients will start to feel more like they have a personal relationship with your brand rather than just recognizing and liking your business. It gives your clients someone to talk about rather than just a brand. And that makes it much easier for them to become an advocate for your brand.