Few Remodelers have made a conscious effort to identify and define their brand personality. But it’s a critical tool for guiding how your brand is portrayed in the marketplace. Your brand personality influences everything from your letterhead to who you hire.
If you’re not familiar with the term, brand personality is a set of human emotional characteristics that are connected to your company name. In other words, it’s the way your company expresses and represents itself.
Why does it matter?
At the most basic level, it guarantees consistency. Truth be told, keeping your brand’s personality on-message can be difficult. It’s not uncommon for employees or subcontractors (your company’s representatives) to drift away from the public image you want to portray. And doing so jeopardizes your brand’s credibility.
So clearly defining the personality of your brand helps keep all stakeholders on track.
The whole point here is to set expectations and give your customers an identity with which to interact. You want to turn your cold and impersonal company into something that the right people can relate to.
Who are the right people? Your ideal client.
For example, Red Bull uses personality traits such as macho, active, outgoing, and unpredictable to connect with their target audience.
Can you see Queen Elizabeth chugging down a can of Red Bull? Neither can I.
How to create your brand personality?
First off you need to understand that, more than likely, your brand personality already exists. So you don’t want to create one. You want to identify it, build on it and make it the standard by which all decisions are made. This will ensure your customers can clearly identify with your brand.
At the end of this post you’ll find a worksheet that can help you identify your brand personality.
Once you’ve identified it, you will want to make sure that it is relatable to your existing customer base. Answer questions like:
- Who is my existing customer?
- What does she relate to?
- What are her traits?
- How does she communicate with her friends? Family? Colleagues?
- What type of humor does she like? Sarcastic and dark? Self-deprecating? Deadpan? Highbrow? Quirky?
- What does she like to do for fun? Go hiking? Stay in and watch a movie?
Answering these type of questions will help you determine if your brand is “acting” the way it should to connect with your clientele.
Parting Thought
As I said, the core purpose of your brand personality is for people to identify and connect with your brand. But in the end, people are far more likely to connect with other people.
So the strongest way to develop your brand personality is to give it a face; whether it’s you, another representative or even a fictional character.
Remember the “I’m a Mac” commercials? Apple didn’t dance around their goal here. They went ahead and literally showed you a “human PC” and a “Human Mac.” Then they let you decide with whom you relate.
