Are you curious about brand personality and how it’s relevant to your business? Do you want to build a more engaging, relatable brand that will boost customer loyalty? If so, you’re in the right place. Just as our own personalities make us likable or annoying, inspiring or dull, magnetic or off-putting, brand personality can do the same for your business.
A well-defined personality gives your brand a more human voice, making it relatable and unique in a crowded competitive landscape. It signals whether your brand is adventurous or dependable, fun or serious, classic or modern.
Brand personality is just as important for brand-to-brand (B2B) brands as it is for consumer-facing brands. Customers in both sectors want to work with brands that are human and engaging.
What is Brand Personality?
Brand personality is the collection of emotional, intellectual, and behavioural patterns unique to a brand and consistent over time. In short, your brand personality is how you would describe your brand if it were a person.
Just like people, brands have recognisable traits that stem from the way they think and feel about the world. The authenticity and consistency of these traits are what separate a strong brand from a weak one.
Brand personality, also known as personality branding, is central to brand strategy, informing both brand design and brand messaging. The best brand personalities are immediately recognisable and deeply relatable.
Why Brand Personality Matters to Your Business
Now that we’ve explored our brand personality definition, let’s look at why brand personality is so important to your business’s success.
Read also: Brand voice: How to develop your company’s unique personality
Brand personality is a critical component of brand positioning and competitive differentiation. It may seem like a soft and fuzzy concept, but the world’s most valuable brands have timeless personalities that are instantly recognizable to customers. Its personality is why Starbucks customers feel so at home in its cafes. Personality branding is the impetus of the thrill that every BMW owner feels when they get behind the wheel.
Personality is the part of your brand that your customers identify and build a relationship with. Because of this, personality branding plays a huge role in driving customer acquisition, fostering brand loyalty and building brand equity.
At the end of the day, its personality determines whether or not your brand experience is an authentic one. And, according to research, no fewer than 88% of customers say authenticity is a key factor when deciding which brand, they like and support.
Let’s take a closer look at a few ways that personality branding can translate into measurable value for your business.
Drive Competitive Differentiation
Brand personality is one of the most important factors in differentiating your brand from the competition. The same product or service can be marketed in vastly different ways depending on personality. The key is cultivating a brand character that is relatable to your ideal customer, distinct from your competitors, and consistent over time.
No need to be different just for difference’s sake. As we’ve seen, authenticity is one of the most valuable drivers of brand personality. Customers know an authentic brand when they see one, and they’re especially good at recognizing it as distinct from other options in the market.
Read also: Brand pillars: What they are and why they matter
Boost Brand Awareness
A distinct brand character makes your brand experience both recognizable and memorable. These are the key components to brand awareness.
The more relatable and consistent your brand personality is, the more your audience will come to recognize, even in a highly competitive market. We naturally resonate towards brands that have recognizable faces and recognizable voices, just like we do with our friends and family.
And brand awareness isn’t just about making new customers aware of your brand through marketing and promotion. It’s also about fostering awareness in existing customers, so that that awareness evolves from recognition to preference.
Bolster Brand Loyalty
Finally, personality branding is key to long-term brand loyalty. Want proof? Just look at Apple. The brand’s devotees see the best parts of themselves in the sleek, artistic, unconventional personality the brand has cultivated over decades of purposeful marketing.
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Apple’s imminently unique, immediately recognizable, and timelessly consistent brand personality has resulted in a legion of brand-loyal customers whose own identities are at least partially defined by ownership of an Apple product.
This is the power of a great brand personalities. Of the three types of brand benefits—emotional, functional, and self-expressive—brand personalities are especially good at conveying self-expressive benefits. That is, customers simply want to be associated with businesses whose brand personalities they relate to. They see their products as extensions of themselves and take pride in buying and owning them.
Last line
Understanding personality branding will help you craft an authentic, magnetic and, above all, consistent brand personality that keeps customers coming back, again and again.
