People are hardwired to associate themselves as either similar to a person or different from a person. We are psychologically programmed to be more attracted to other people rather than businesses, and more so if the other person’s personality is in line with our own.
In a busy world filled with numerous companies, brands strive for success by looking for ways to stand out from the rest. One such way is to make the brands relatable to their respective target customers. People tend to like people who are like themselves and the same is true with brands. This is where the concept of Brand Personality comes in.
In this article, we’ll start by understanding what is brand personality, look at a few famous examples of brand personality, and explore how to define brand personality for your own business. So, let’s begin the journey.
What is Brand Personality?
Brand Personality is a segment of human psychology where the idea is to give a brand certain characteristics in order to make it more identifiable and relatable to people. Brand Personality is about personifying a brand. It is statistically observed that a person is most likely to buy from a brand if the brand’s personality is similar to that of their own.
Defining a personality for your business makes it convenient for a potential customer to feel accustomed to your business right from their very first interaction. When the brand personality falls in line with the potential customer’s personality, they tend to turn into loyal long-term customers. Brand personality plays a crucial role in creating and nurturing strong bonds with the brand’s target customers.
Brand personality is what directs the tone of voice of a brand, its messaging, and its advertising style, to name a few. These are tools or media through which a brand displays its personality to its target customers.
The Brand Personality Framework
Jennifer Aaker, an American behavioral scientist and author, developed a framework for defining the brand personality using a 5-dimensional structure. This model defines a brand’s personality using one or more of the 5 main dimensions that consist of commonly found personality traits or characteristics.
These 5 core dimensions are as follows:
Excitement: This personality type tends to be youthful, energetic, bold, spirited, and carefree.
Sincerity: This personality type tends to be thoughtful, kind, honest, trustworthy, and ethical.
Competence: This personality type tends to be intelligent, trustworthy, reliable, accomplished, and influential.
Sophistication: This personality type tends to be charming, glamorous, prestigious, elegant, and exclusive.
Ruggedness: This personality type tends to be tough, rebellious, outdoorsy, dynamic, and courageous.
Generally, any of these 5 personality types could be used to describe the brand personality of your business. It is also seen that a lot of popular brands can be attributed to having a combination of two or more personality types.
Brands and Brand Personalities
Now, let’s look at 6 examples of famous brands along with their brand personalities and character attributes in detail:
1. Nike
The athletic footwear and apparel brand, Nike has the brand personality type of ‘excitement’. Through their inspirational communication and sports-centric imagery, it’s clear that Nike has an energetic, bold, and spirited personality.
2. Dove
The beauty and well-being brand, Dove has the brand personality type of ‘sincerity’. Through their ads that focus on “real” beauty as compared to the pretentious practices of competitor brands, Dove has developed an ethical, honest, and caring personality over time.
3. Microsoft
The extremely popular technology giant, Microsoft has the brand personality type of ‘competence’. Though they might not have been successful in a few ventures, they have gained the reputation of an accomplished, influential, and reliable brand, primarily through their software products like the ‘Windows’ operating system and a wide range of productivity applications.
4. Louis Vuitton
The luxury fashion brand, Louis Vuitton has the brand personality type of ‘sophistication’. This premium fashion brand produces one-of-a-kind garments, handbags, and other accessories that shout exclusivity, class, and elegance.
5. Harley Davidson
The world-famous motorcycle brand, Harley Davidson has the brand personality type of ‘ruggedness’. Just like the rider community it attracts, the brand has a rough, tough, and rebellious personality.
6. Tesla
The extremely popular automotive and clean energy company, Tesla has a combination of the brand personality types of ‘excitement’ and ‘sophistication’. While the brand’s products are classy, charming, and elegant, the way the brand presents itself shows evidence of an exciting and energetic personality.
How to Create a Brand Personality?
Now, that we have understood what it truly means, let’s figure out how to create a brand personality for your own business.
In my opinion, a good starting point in your journey to create and develop a brand personality for your business is to ask yourself these 3 questions about personality types:
Question 1: What personality type are you attracted to you as an individual?
A lot of the aspects of a business like brand values and brand purpose start from the preferences of founders themselves. The same can be true for the brand personality as well. A good starting point when crafting a brand personality for your business is to ask yourself what would your preference be concerning a person’s personality.
Question 2: What kind of people will your business’s target audience be most attracted to?
Since customers and target audience define a business’s success, a good idea is to keep yourself in their shoes and understand what personality type(s) would your target audience be most attracted to you. This information could then be used to craft one for your business with at least some surety.
Question 3: What are the brand personalities of your competitor businesses?
Be it a direct or indirect competition, you might have competitor businesses that have already been strong players in your industry for a while now. And, chances are that they might already have a good idea about a brand personality that works in the industry. Though you might want to stand out among the other players, this could be a good starting point for crafting your own brand personality.
List down the answers to these 3 questions in the form of a list of character attributes. All of those attributes can be categorized into 1 or more of the 5 personality types or the 5 dimensions as mentioned in Jennifer Aaker’s Brand Personality Framework.
Depending on the number of attributes that fall into the same category rank the top most personality type that seems to be influencing the brand more as compared to other types. This would be the governing type for your business’s brand personality.
A great next step in determining the most effective personality and character type for your business is to study and implement an advanced brand strategy tool called Brand Archetypes.
Conclusion
All in all, Brand Personality is a great way of making use of human psychology in helping your brand emotionally connect well with your target audience. Such a brand would be readily accepted as a relatable brand by your customers and help build brand loyalty and trust right from the beginning.
Asking the right questions, making use of the Brand Personality Framework, and understanding the examples of famous brands, would definitely be handy in determining and effectively crafting the personality of your business as this forms a crucial step in developing the Brand Persona of your business as part of its Brand Strategy.
Here are a few reads you might find interesting:
Comments