How to Find a Balanced Approach to Brand Personality.

It’s imperative that your brand identity align with your brand personality if you want your audience to believe and embrace your message.

Hooray for everything! There isn’t a day that goes by without a celebration of something; there seems to be a National or International Day for anything and everything. For companies trying to engage with existing and potential customers on social media, it’s usually a fun way to interact and show a more human side to your business – show your brand personality.

What’s brand personality you ask? Brand personality is a set of human characteristics that are attributed to a brand name, personal attributes that are consistent with your brand identity. By establishing a brand personality, companies can hope to align with consumers who feel as if they share the same human traits, which in turn creates an emotional connection. These set of human characteristics coined in 1997 by Jennifer Aaker, a social psychologist and professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, fall into five broad categories – Excitement, Sincerity, Ruggedness, Competence and Sophistication. There are plenty of studies done on the Aaker’s Brand Personality Dimensions, so I won’t belabor the point in this blog, except to say that as an organization, it’s imperative that your brand identity align with your brand personality if you want your audience to believe and embrace your message.

Which gets me back to the never-ending celebrations. We all see the endless “Happy National This and That Day” on company’s posts. Most organizations do a fabulous job at interweaving their personality into such celebrations; a winemaker creating social media posts to celebrate National Rose´ Day seems logical and aligned with their business. But if the emotional message and the personality traits in the posts contradict your brand, they won’t resonate with your audience, and even more, could quite possibly turn them away And it’s not even the message that you send; if your actions don’t align with your personality, you can say all the clever things you want; you will certainly lose followers by being disingenuous. We’ve all read about PR nightmares for larger companies that were caught doing something went against their mission.

So how do you create your brand personality, maintain it, and help differentiate it from the competition? It’s important to understand what characteristics you want your brand to have and dig deep to understand the human attributes that will connect you with your customers. If your company is seen as sincere – trustworthy and friendly – how do those traits get visualized in your imagery, font style, color palette, and so on. And how are those traits voiced through communications, messaging, advertising? Once you’ve done the work to build your brand personality, be consistent and stay committed to it in all internal and external marketing aspects. Your goal is to resonate with your audience to build and maintain the relationship. And like all relationships, that means that over time you can reassess your brand personality; if you’ve grown and matured over time, then it’s a perfect reason to rebrand.

If building a brand personality seems like an overwhelming task for you and your team, especially as a small business, then look to a professional marketing organization that can help you get started. A marketing professional who will partner with you to ensure that your brand identity and brand personality are aligned with your business model. Finding the right voice to communicate with your audience – whether it be for National Donut Day or Labor Day – will be the key to successful communication and growth for your business.