Your Brand Personality: How to Create a Unique Brand Voice
Personality? Really? Yes.
Okay, you've heard it all about branding, brand voice, brand identity, even brand character... but "brand personality"... what the heck is that? Let's quickly go over some practical definitions so we can all agree:
Brand : How the public perceives your company.
Branding : Activities undertaken by a company to establish its brand.
Brand Identity : Logo, font, style, tone, and voice all fall into this category; it’s all about creating the feeling you want to surround your content across all the channels it appears on.
Brand Personality – Human traits attributed to a company. Quirky? Soft and subtle? Rugged and outdoorsy? These are all personality traits you can give to your company.
Today we're going to talk about the latter. Most companies today can cellphone number philippines format summed up in 5 main personality traits: Exciting, Sincere, Robust, Competent and Sophisticated. Which one are you? That's the question today's article aims to help you answer.
Defining your company's brand personality
It’s not easy to say, but in the beginning, your company ’s personality will be your personality. You are the creative brain of your company and your product/service, and all hires will go through you as well, so even the team will show your personality to some extent. The value proposition (EVP) of your team members? Yes, it will reflect your values, your mission, and the culture you want to create in your company .
So the first step in developing your brand personality is to do some soul searching. Developing and documenting these traits early on can be a game-changer as you grow and increase your staff, expand your product line, and so on. You’ll have a sense of who your company is, so it’ll be much easier to ensure your decisions fit that image and are reflected in your content and communications.
Do you have a social media presence ? Ask your marketing team (or a good friend if you’re the one in charge of marketing) to conduct an audit of your social media accounts. Don’t tell them what you’re looking for; just tell them to read through your timelines and compile a list of words that come to mind. Bonus points if you can do this with multiple people or groups of people—think of it as the focus group phase of a marketing campaign. But this is all about you, so I hope you have thick skin, just in case.
Take advantage of internal resources
When we say this, we’re usually talking about your employees, company assets, etc. This time it means more than that. Your resources include yourself, your inner circle of founders, investors, employees, product designs, existing online presence, the PR you’ve sent out in the run-up to launch, and pretty much everything else related to your company. Pay special attention to your EVP. What does it offer employees when they come on board? This includes the tangibles, like 401k and healthcare coverage, but also the intangibles, like office culture and work-life balance. It will tell you a lot about your brand personality.
Ask your inner circle if you're unsure about any of these aspects. What attracted them to your company? What has kept them going despite the ups and downs of early-stage funding rounds and late-night code sprints?
Product personality also matters
Describe your product as if you were a friend describing another friend to see if they fancy a date. Ask your designers, developers, sales team and executive assistants to do the same. And if you're a services consultancy or similar, ask for anonymous descriptions of your consultants and what makes them stand out.
The idea is to dig deeper into your product personality. At this point, you should have an impressive list of descriptors: about you, your team, your company culture, your online presence, and your product. It’s time to combine all of this into a brand personality for your company.
Designing the brand personality you want for your company
The easiest way to do this is by using a hypothetical business with a theoretical product. Meet Get Unlost, LLC. This exciting new company , based in Boulder, Colorado, has developed an app that promises to keep you on track when looking for that Vanlife Glamping Spot you’ve read/seen about on Instagram.
They do this with a combination of GPS and crowdsourced directions from an active community of Vanlifers who have been following the founder’s exploits on social media since he began his adventures four years ago (also where the first round of funding came from via a crowdfunding campaign). How do branding and outbound marketing strategies come into play ?