All posts by bmw5464
Selecting Your Brand’s Personality
In a recent post, I presented a paradigm for linking brand image, brand identity, and brand personality. I purposely did not expand upon selecting brand personality because it is my preference to discuss the process I recently used separately.
There are five primary brand personalities: sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, and ruggedness. Defining which personality to use for the purpose of developing a brand identity may seem as easy as determining which sub-criteria align with you brand best. In my opinion, this process leaves too much room for error.
In my opinion developing a brand, personality is a useful method for strategically enhancing the target marketing process for cultivating the most beneficial brand identity. Because strengthening the brand identity is paramount, I believe the best starting point is to focus on considering what strategic brand identity will result in the best received and most compelling brand image.
Following my process is not the most efficient process, but I argue the payoff will be the creation of a more effective brand personality. The first steps in this process are to strategically evaluate the organization’s vision, mission, purpose, target audience, organization culture, mottos and market position (among other factors). When all this information is at your disposal it makes identifying not only which brand personalities are applicable, but also which is most suitable for converting the target audience.
The reason I highly recommend using an extended process rather than the obvious efficient process is that in my experience many brands are representative of more than one brand personality. For example, a brand may be both rugged and exciting or sincere and competent. The multiple brand personalities will likely be intertwined. The challenge is ensuring that brand messages developed utilizing the central brand personality are the most compelling.
The ultimate success of properly using a brand personality to craft marketing messages comes down to capturing the attention of the target audience(s). Because a lot of resources will likely be spent on the resulting marketing communications programs, it is worth taking the time to thoroughly evaluate which brand personality suits the product, aligns with organizational values, and will be most relevant for the target audience(s). Therefore do not shoot from the hip; develop a marketing mentality, understand the target audience, and consider the marketing messages from the target audience’s perspective.
Generic Concept for Branding
Based on a recent project I created this infographic and generic branding related paradigm. I realize this utilization of these three broad concepts may not represent their intended use. I tend to feel strongly about developing processes that go beyond simply knowing of a concept, but rather put those concepts to use. In this way, the concepts are owned through knowledge creation.
A simple high-level process for developing and managing brands could center itself around focusing on the concepts depicted in the infographic included above. All three concepts (brand image, brand identity, and brand personality) function in symphony within this paradigm. When assessing and/or managing an organization’s brand it is important to have a finger on the pulse of how stakeholder groups perceive the brand. To ignore the public and other stakeholder’s perceptions risks committing to branding efforts that do not effectively connect with important target audiences, and may result in missed opportunities. Brand identity is the strategic aspect of creating or managing a brand in a manner beneficial for the organization. To do so effectively requires knowledge of target audiences, and use of brand personality as well as being able to align branding efforts with the organization’s vision. In this paradigm, brand personality can be viewed as the tools at a professionals disposal to generate a brand identity which will effectively reach targeted audiences and favorably foster a positive brand image.
Understanding the way these concepts function together, therefore can help determine what actions ought to be taken for valuable branding activities to occur. To brand image one will likely conduct marketing research. Creating a beneficial brand identity will likely entail collaborative strategy meetings and incorporate concepts such as DAGMAR to ensure creative efforts are not wasteful. Being ever vigilant of brand personality assists with developing brand identity efforts in alignment with target audiences beliefs and interests, thus making it easier to coordinate a value-added promotional mix.