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What is brand personality?

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What is brand personality?

You’ve heard us mention brand personality as an important piece of your overall brand strategy, but what exactly is it? And how do you go about defining your company’s personality?

WHERE ARE YOU ON THE SCALE?

Brand personality is something that is chosen at the beginning of a branding project. These early decisions are used to influence the larger creative strategy.

Think of personality as your company’s position on a scale between different character traits. A set of character trait “pairings” make up a visual personality spectrum. Here is a visual example of a luxury makeup company’s potential personality spectrum:

Brand personality spectrum

It’s important to define where your company lies on this spectrum in order to, as always, make sure your messaging is clear and consistent. Determining where you are on this set of scales will not only influence how you relate to your audience, but also who your audience even is.

WE’LL SAY IT AGAIN: CONSISTENCY IS KEY

You might be tired of hearing it by now, but it’s worth repeating: consistency must be your top priority when it comes to communicating with your customers. It’s quite impossible for a company to be both personalities on either end of the scales in our example without coming across like it has a personality disorder. It’s important for your customers to perceive you in a consistent way no matter how they’re interacting with you.

TAKING IT VISUAL

Determining your company’s personality is so important when it comes to translating your strategy into a visual brand. These initial decisions are key in determining which approach your designer takes with your company’s visual branding. It will influence what your designer takes into consideration when it comes to color palette, typography, and graphic styles.

For example, if a company wishes to come across as down-to-earth, fun and personable, I might choose a bright, playful color palette and hand-drawn graphic elements to accentuate a certain amount of organic human-ness. If, like our personality spectrum example above, I’m working with a company who wishes to exude a high-end, luxury feel, I might choose a very muted color palette, with strong blacks and whites, perhaps with a hint of gold lines here or there. I would focus on geometric graphic elements, using hard lines and shapes with a good amount of white space.

These two examples are just some of many, but you can see how important a well-defined brand personality is in determining the rest of your overall brand strategy.

If you’d like us to tell you how well your brand is communicating your desired personality, please reach out to us and we’d love to offer you a free brand analysis!

Why your brand should be ever-changing

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Why your brand should be ever-changing

An “ever-changing brand”? Come again??

Because a good brand takes a fair amount of time, effort, and dedication to create, it might seem completely counter-intuitive to even think that it might ever change. But what if I told you that having a “fluid” or “ever-changing” approach to your branding is not merely healthy but completely necessary in order to stay relevant?

CHANGE IS A CONSTANT

Even way back in ancient times, Greek philosopher Heraclitus observed that “change is the only constant in life.” This concept has been true throughout history and is perhaps even more true now, with technology progressing at an exponentially faster rate than in years past.

Now more than ever is there an emphasis on improving and expediating everything in life. With this emphasis comes a consumer expectation for the brands they love and use to be constantly bettering their services to becoming more relevant to and convenient for their daily needs.

The expectation of change has already been set. You must adapt. To neglect to do so could mean sentencing yourself to failure.

BUT ISN’T THIS DRASTIC?

To change your mindset about your brand from being static to fluid might seem like a big task. But making your brand fluid instead of stagnant doesn’t have to be as drastic as you might think.

Viewing your brand as fluid doesn’t mean that you have to order a complete rehaul of your brand each year – in fact, this type of drastic change could be detrimental to your brand perception (remember how we talked about the need for your company to remain familiar and consistent for your customers).

Instead, view your brand’s fluidity as being open to a series of small changes over time in order to stay relevant to the needs of your target market. This could mean changing the way you choose to communicate with them if you’ve found that one avenue simply isn’t working. It could mean adjusting your company voice and tone to portray a slightly different version of your company. It could mean changing the style of your logo. It could mean a lot of things – and you are the only one who will truly know what changes will be effective for your company.

KEEPING YOUR BRAND HEALTHY

Just because your brand should be fluid doesn’t mean that you should go change things just for the fun of it. Whenever you redesign part of your brand, you should always approach it strategically. There must be a reason behind what you’re doing.

We suggest taking the time to re-evaluate your brand once a year, unless it’s needed sooner. It’s just like taking your brand to the doctor for a yearly check-up. We want to make sure it’s operating the way it was designed to, and that it’s yielding the results you want from it.

We offer brand evaluation services, and if you’re interested, please reach out to us!