Brand Personality Guide
A Comprehensive Guide to Building your Brand Personality
Have you ever wondered why some brands seem to have a magnetic pull that always draws us towards them?
These brands are so ingrained in our daily lives that we automatically choose them over any other options, almost as if they are the only ones that exist.
But what is it about these brands that makes us feel so connected to them?
The answer lies in their unique brand personality.
So, what exactly is a brand personality?
In this guide, we will explore these concepts together, to help you develop a strong personal and business brand.
Just as every individual has a distinct personality and vibe, every brand has its own unique identity.
While we typically think of brands solely as businesses, it's important to remember that people can also be brands in their own right.
Defining and communicating your brand personality can be challenging, as it requires a deep understanding of your personal values, beliefs, and style.
But with our ultimate guide to brand personality, you will learn everything you need to know, from why brand personality matters, to how to define your own brand identity, and how to effectively communicate it to your audience.
By following our step-by-step approach, you will gain clarity on your brand, and be able to create a strong brand positioning and brand voice that resonates with your target audience.
Whether you are looking to enhance your personal brand or grow your business, our guide to brand personality is an essential resource.
So, if you need help creating a professional, engaging brand that stands out from the crowd, contact us.
We’re The Branded, and as brand experts, we understand all things branding, including brand personality.
We’re a Digital Marketing Agency specializing in helping startups, businesses and individuals who need all kinds of branding and marketing services. We offer affordable rates as a full-service marketing agency.
Table of contents:
What is a brand personality, and what does “branding myself” mean?
Why does brand personality matter?
Branding myself: a guide (just for you)
How to define your brand personality
How to communicate your brand personality
Brand personality examples
Brand personality guide takeaway
What Is Brand Personality?
Brand personality and branding yourself go hand in hand. We’ll show what we mean in this brand personality guide.
Let’s define what branding yourself looks like first. With personal branding, one creates a branding strategy around a person instead of a business entity.
With personal branding, people can position themselves as experts within their field to advance their careers, online profile or their business.
When you’ve developed a personal brand, you’re able to sell more products, save time while working, and increase opportunities for you.
If you don’t brand yourself, someone else will.
This process takes time and patience because building a personal brand doesn’t happen right away. It takes lots of planning and asking yourself what you stand for. That’s what the definition of "branding myself" looks like and the main purpose of a personal brand. Of course, there is a process and we’ll share 5 tips, later on, to get your personal brand going.
Now, what is a brand personality? We’ve touched on this in the beginning. Every business has a different vibe to them, and everyone has an opinion about it. Your brand perception can differ from one person to the next. So, how do we cultivate and communicate a brand personality that’s true to your business and who you are?
We’ll show you. This brand personality guide will cover it all.
Brand personality is defined as:
Brand personality is a set of human characteristics associated with a brand. A brand's personality consists of a set of traits and characteristics that are consistently used throughout its entire experience. That experience is intended for the target audience.
It can also be classified into groups of people with similar traits that cause their behaviours to be similar.
Remember that creating tailored messaging that resonates with your audience will drive action and thus create connections. That’s what it’s all about with your brand personality: connecting, humanly. We’re a Vancouver Branding Agency ready to help you refine your brand personality and even create a guide for you (brand bible). Reach out to us for our affordable rates!
Why Does Brand Personality Matter?
Familiarity is the key to brand personality. If you offer familiar characteristics to your audience, you’re more likely to create a connection. That will allow you to showcase your business while connecting on a more human level.
We can think about it like this: our target audience's personality traits can tell us something about the characteristics that are likely to influence their behaviour.
Why does that matter? Well, a personable brand influences its target audience's perception. Buying decisions are driven by emotion, and brand personality is a crucial factor.
Marketers see the benefits of a brand personality. They’re seeing it’s essential for them to put themselves out there to achieve business goals and personal goals. A brand's personality contributes to its brand positioning, too.
If you want to stand out, your brand personality should humanize the brand giving it substance, depth and making it accessible and relatable to the target audience. We’re talking about brand authenticity (something that The Branded has implemented for our clients who are starting their businesses).
If we think about why we choose specific brands over others. It’s because of brand personality and our own personal brand. We choose brands we want to build a relationship with it because it says something about us.
A brand’s personality translates to a customer’s identity. A quick example of that: if one supports and purchases from our client Saint Perry? The customer is communicating that they are fashion-forward, sophisticated, luxe. Another client example would be Sneakertopia–the customer’s personal brand could represent boldness and creativity. We’ve helped both of these clients redefine their brand identity.
Another reason why brand personality matters: Brand personality plays a role in customer acquisition, creating brand equity and brand loyalty. Build your community with a brand personality using this guide!
Next, we’ll look at a “branding myself” guide for you to understand how to brand yourself so that you can apply a brand personality to your business. After all, you are the brand, too.
Personal Branding Guide
Here are 5 tips on Personal branding
Personal Branding: Define your brand, your expertise and know your ‘why’
Build your brand foundation and exert yourself as the expert of your brand focus. Together with knowing the “why” of your business, you’ll have a strong foundation to stand on. Take the time to do this, so you can communicate who you are and what your brand is all about.
Thinks of words like: bold, collaborative, forward-thinking, creative, visionary, diplomatic, intuitive, ethical, genuine when describing your persona, culture, and outlook.
Besides hearing about you as a professional, people want to understand your personality as well. Be confident in injecting your personality into the discussion–it’s what makes you stand out.
A tip to define your expertise: outline your experience and use that as a map. That exercise will help you find your core strengths and abilities. If you don’t have any experiences, write down what you are interested in and what you are willing to pursue. After that, educate yourself. There are a plethora of online resources you can access. Don’t forget to share your progress. People will be interested and will want to see your progress. It will create a community of like-minded individuals.
To help uncover the “why” of your business, here are some questions to ask yourself:
Why are you here?
What’s your purpose?
Why do you want to create a brand name?
Once you answer those questions, the next step is to position your brand. Find a distinctive and memorable way to explain to your target audience how your promise fulfils their needs, then deliver that.
Personal Brand: Establish a presence and generate brand awareness through networking.
Brand awareness: a crucial component to the concept of “branding myself” and brand personality. So, you’ll likely be Googled. If you’re building your network, creating a community, trying to advance your career–people will do their due diligence and vet you. It’s good to make sure your branded content is what appears under your name. You can start with a website or your own blog.
With this brand strategy, you can generate brand awareness and improve your networking goals. Along with this tip, try to be everywhere where you see fit and show up for yourself, your business, and your community. The more you interact with people, the more opportunities come your way, and the bigger your network becomes. Don’t be scared to expand to other categories, too.
While you may have a niche, you never know if you’ll meet someone offering a different perspective or another set of expertise you might need. So, connect and establish your presence.
Branding myself: Understand how others perceive you
Your personal branding strategy involves understanding how others perceive you and what people say about you when you’re not in the room. How do you extract this information? By asking those around you is a good start! Ask them to describe you in one word, what they think your best at and what your weaknesses are.
Understanding this information can help you further create a personal brand, brand personality and strategy. You’ll be able to address things you don’t want to be perceived as.
Branding yourself: Define your brand image
Create a brand bible. This will help you organize your brand image. To create and define your brand image: find photos, graphics and brand colours that speak to you. Visualizing your brand image will help build your website and online platforms. Your brand begins to tell its story when you have an image that reflects the nature of your value, both online and offline.
At The Branded, we can help you define your brand image and brand identity. We’re a Creative Agency, after all. From brand logo design, website design development to package design. We got you.
Branding myself: Engage with others & amplify yourself
It’s hard to stand out, but when you’re branding yourself–you have one thing no one has: your personality, experiences and walk of life all combined. Use that and amplify yourself. While you are amplifying yourself, engage with others. Start with social media. Give the content you like a “heart” only if you like it, of course, and provide value in the comments. That will get you noticed by the content owner.
How does this build your personal brand? It builds connection and brand awareness.
How To Define Your Brand Personality
Part of this brand personality guide is showing you how to define your brand personality. We’ve looked at a few frameworks, and this one we'll feature is a great introduction to developing your brand personality. Create a visual identity that reflects your personality and the tone of your messages. Here is a framework that can work to define your brand personality. It is the brand personality archetypes.
One way to help define your brand is by choosing an archetype. In order to understand concepts, people often use symbolism, according to Carl Jung's theory. This model is based on that. A total of 12 archetypes represent different groupings of characteristics, aspirations, values, and attitudes.
Now you have to ask which of these identities would your ideal client relate to the most? It also has to align with your personal brand. Or else, it just won’t be as authentic as you would want it to be. Need some brand authenticity info? Here is a guideline on how to achieve brand authenticity.
How To Communicate Your Brand Personality
Once you have your personality traits for your brand, it’s time to strategize. How do you communicate this to the public and your target audience? Here are 3 ways.
1. Visual brand image
We’ve discussed this in the "branding myself" guideline, but this is what we mean by it all connecting. Your brand image is your logo, fonts, brand colours and your visual identity used throughout your online and offline assets. You may want design guidelines, communication guidelines and possibly a brand bible.
2. Brand voice and tone
The brand anchors you choose for your brand personality can help form your brand voice. Your brand voice is how you communicate, and the tone is the infliction and emotional emphasis in different scenarios. Here is a brand voice guideline we created for you and more brand voice exploration here.
3. Brand actions
Do you walk the walk? Sadly, a lot of businesses and people don’t match the visual identity and brand personality they created for themselves. That’s why it’s important to stay true to who you are so that you can easily walk the walk. All that you do contributes to brand perception, so make sure your actions are filled with the intent to follow through with your brand promise. Your actions need to be aligned with the personality that you defined.
And, remember you need to be consistent in your communication. We can help you communicate your brand personality. Reach out to us! Growing a business takes a lot of work, and as a Marketing and Branding Agency, we can help you scale.
Brand Personality Examples
Here are 3 brand personality examples we thought you could gather inspiration from.
They are a client of ours who knew their brand personality well, and they wanted us to flush it out through creative assets, like a brand bible, and that we did. Taking a look at their website and copy, you can tell their personality exudes confidence, community and an overall space for creative minds.
Grindology was a client we worked with. As a branding agency, we created their communication strategy with their brand personality in mind. We also designed and developed their website. If we take a look at the brand personality archetypes, they land somewhere in the Jester role. The traits would be energizing, fun, light-hearted, enjoyment.
Another strong brand personality example is Traditional. Traditional is a cannabis company that provides the cleanest and most innovative cannabis products, with exclusive strains hand-grown in LA. We brought clarity to their brand message. We also developed their brand identity, purpose and created their brand bible and guidelines. Along with that, a custom iconography set was created for them. Plus more.
Traditional communicates inclusivity and innovation. If we were to choose from the brand personality archetypes, they would be somewhere in between “The Creator and “The Rebel.” What is your brand communicating?
Brand Personality Guide Takeaway
If you can only take one thing from this post, defining your own personal brand and applying that to your business to create brand personality leads to a strong alignment for your goals. And it will lead you to brand clarity.
A brand's true power comes from consistent brand identity, voice, and actions. As a result of consistent actions, people start to trust and choose you. This brand personality guide has shown you all the ways to build your personal brand and brand personality. It's your turn to put them into action!
Don’t forget to reach out to us if you need any of our digital marketing and branding services. We’ll work with you to bring your brand vision and brand personality to life.
Checkout our Other Blogs on Branding
Branding Services for Startups
A Simple Brand Positioning Framework That Will Help You Sell Like Crazy