How to Develop a Brand Persona and a Brand Identity
A 5-Step Workshop to Brand Personality
I’m going to make a controversial statement: brands are people. No really. The best brands transcend marketing strategies and carefully crafted messaging platforms. They go beyond color palettes scientifically validated by focus groups and brand guidelines that govern when and how employees may use a logo.
What a Brand Is Not
We can come closer to understanding what a brand is by highlighting what it isn’t. Branding is more than deciding how to design a logo or which colors to use in a poster. In other words, a brand is none of the things most people assume it is:
Your company name
What you sell
Your employees
Your marketing strategy
What you say about yourself
A brand is not even a corporate identity or branding guidelines. A great brand begins long before someone in the marketing department puts a name to a company or the design department draws the shape of a logo.
The best brands, as if by magical incantation, come to take on a life of their own, becoming more than the sum of their parts. Becoming, in the end, larger even than the company from which they’re born. Brands are not just alive; they’re also immortal—capable of living beyond their creators, threatening to evade death itself. For confirmation of brand’s death-defying power, look no further than Coca-Cola: a brand that’s now over 140 years old yet shows no signs of aging.
So many people—indeed so many marketers—have such a hard time trying to grasp what a brand is or how branding works. But it’s simple really. And we don’t need a fancy, contrived definition by a so-called brand expert to tell us what we all intuitively know. Brands are simply metaphorical individuals and branding is the way in which marketers transform the collective, faceless entities known as organizations into living, breathing human beings capable of inspiring admiration, trust, and loyalty. Indeed, branding is what gives a brand its equity or value, enabling it to command a premium in the marketplace.
In short, a brand is all of the following:
Founder — A brand becomes the bedrock of an organization, not only helping a company to know who they are, but how to act and react. If an organization doesn’t truly know who they are, how can they determine what they should produce or what market they should enter? A healthy brand helps define business objectives and ensures a business is driving the right outcomes.
Authenticator — In a world where it’s difficult to tell what is real and what is fake, an organization’s ability to know who they are, be true to who they are, and communicate they are who they say they are is the difference between success and failure. At its most basic level, a strong brand communicates an organization’s authenticity and validates to its audience that it is real, believable, and true.
Guarantor — Like it or not, every organization makes a promise to its audience about what it will deliver. Brand is all the promises and perceptions that we want our customers to feel about our organization and its products or services. But a mistake is thinking that a brand’s promise is tied to the product or company at a material level. Rather, it operates above these layers, convincing its audience of its transformative power to change their lives. Whether it’s helping you build your social life (Facebook), giving you the freedom to move unencumbered (Uber), or to realize your dream of traveling the world (AirBnb), a great brand is a guarantor—that which promises to change lives and delivers on that promise.
Unifier — An organization is only strong when it’s working together to achieve its ends. How can an organization succeed if everyone is disconnected and going in different directions? One of the most sacred gifts of branding is its ability to transform many into one. Thus, branding is the e pluribus unum of marketing. When well-executed, a brand effortlessly communicates that your organization is strong, unified, consistent, and capable so that employees can all begin to row together and consumers can begin to trust you.
Differentiator — In a competitive landscape, difference is everything. A brand helps a company know what makes them different and, consequently, to know what makes them better than their competitors. A brand helps your company stand out in a crowded marketplace. In short, it helps an organization to clearly communicate their difference so consumers can distinguish their brand from competitors and choose one brand over another.
Reputation Builder — Every organization has a reputation. An organization's brand is a badge that tells the world how good or bad the company is. Your brand is either singing your success or whimpering your weakness. In this way, a brand is all of a company's wins and all of its losses captured in a single gestalt—its strength and weakness instantiated. In this way, Brand is a real-time signifier, determining an organization’s health. For these reasons, a brand continually reminds a company of where they’ve been, but also where they’re going.
While it is one thing to understand what a brand truly is or to recognize one when you see it, it is quite another to know how to create a great brand. If it were easy, I wouldn’t need to write this post and you wouldn’t need to read it. If it were easy, every company that ever launched would become successful. None would go out of business. And all would occupy a primary position in your mind.
But the reality is that most companies fail and at least 50% of small businesses fail within the first five years. What the shocking business failure statistics show is that unfortunately branding isn’t easy. Yet many organizations do succeed in developing their brand and become disciplined about managing it. How do they do this? While there are many activities responsible for their success, the first step toward realizing a great brand is crafting a brand “persona.” For the remainder of this post, I’ll define what a brand persona is, explain why it's critical for developing a brand, and illustrate how a company can develop a brand personality.
Ready to start taking your brand seriously? Verge has developed award-winning brands and campaigns, including Apple. Find out how we can help you develop your brand identity.
A brand persona is technically defined as the collection of personality traits, attitudes, and values that enables an audience to identify and connect with an organization. But it’s so much more than that.
As I suggested earlier in this post, persona is just the technical word marketers use to refer to a person or an individual. When developed successfully, an organization’s brand persona is an answer to this fundamental question: who are we?
A brand persona thus gives “shape” to the collection of tangible presentations or “touchpoints” your company puts out in the world as well as all of the intangible elements. More clearly, a brand persona is that which allows your audience to put a proverbial face to your company.
Just so we’re clear, anything your brand puts out into the world can contribute to its brand personality. It can be something as important as the primary color you’ve chosen for your logo and brand palette which conveys a “mood,” or it can be something as small as the playful microcopy you send to your audience after they’ve purchased or downloaded something from your site. In each of these situations, personality is conveyed by making a strategic choice. In this respect, an organization's brand persona may be defined by the set of strategic choices it makes about how to communicate with its audiences. In other words, if the sum total of these choices delineates a personality, then the failure to make choices only means your company will lack a personality and thus a face.
So why does your organization need a face? How does that help your company? There are two primary reasons why your company needs a “face.”
The first reason is that developing brand persona pushes your organization to do necessary work it needs to do but keeps putting off. At a surface level, developing a brand persona forces a company to do the inevitable soul searching that helps them discover who they really are and, more importantly, who they wish to be. In some rare instances, these two ideas coalesce or overlap, but in most situations as an organization moves to identify its persona, it discovers a wide delta between who they are and who they think they are or who they want to be. While this can be stressful and disheartening at first, it need not be. For it can also ignite a true renaissance—the moment an organization begins to take its identity into its own hands—indeed, that miraculous moment a company can single-handedly architect its own rebirth.
The second and most important reason why your organization needs a “face” is that it will help your brand connect to your audience. A brand persona allows your audience to identify with your brand and hence your organization. In order for your organization to sell products or services, it needs to first develop a relationship with its customers. This relationship is what enables your audience to start engaging with your brand. All customers are a brand’s audience, but not all audiences are a brand’s customers. A brand personality enables a brand to move those who consume its content from audience to customer and eventually to a brand ambassador. Why? All great brands begin with something discernable about their brand personality that enables the audience to identify with them. Once an audience begins to identify with a brand, they see the brand as part of themselves. Someone in short, they not only can’t be without, but someone who also validates all of their choices. This identification is a kind of “affinity,” and when customers develop an affinity for a brand, they develop a life-long attachment to it, which increases customer retention and builds life-long loyalty.
Apple Brand Case Study
Let’s take a look at a brand personality example. If you think about iconic brands like Apple, you see how brand personality impacts the bottom line of a company. Apple’s audiences aren’t just customers in the typical sense of that word. They are so much more. They are evangelists. Folks who identify so strongly with Apple’s brand persona that they develop a religious devotion to it. Apple’s products not only demand a premium in the marketplace due to this persona, but they also develop life-long customer relationships.
Apple has customers who are so devoted to their brand that they are willing to pay twice as much for their products, purchase every new product the company launches without hesitation, and join Apple communities and forums where they can be with other Apple enthusiasts who celebrate the brand. Their houses are filled with Apple products, they wear Apple t-shirts, and they brag to their friends about how cool they are that they are Apple fans. In short, being an Apple enthusiast gives them social currency, provides a social community, and helps them establish and maintain important personal relationships. See the umpteen news articles about Apple-obsessed customers getting married and designing their wedding cakes after Apple products. And this is all due to Apple’s iconic brand persona which has called more than 3 generations to connect so deeply with the company that it becomes almost impossible for these customers to separate themselves from the company or disengage with it without losing who they are.
Alina Wheeler discusses the power of brand to connect people and to impact them on an emotional level:
But if you were to peel back the layers of Apple’s brand persona what would you find? You would find that the company has a clear personality that exhibits the following characteristics. Apple’s brand persona is:
Brilliant
Passionate
Simple (rather than cluttered or complex)
Innovative
Rebellious
Elegant
And if we were to use one word to describe the brand we would probably go with “revolutionary,” which connotes a brand ethos that challenges the power structure while simultaneously ushering in the future. Those who identify with Apple’s brand persona see themselves through Apple’s “face” as also being brilliant, passionate, simple, innovative and rebellious.
Apple’s smartest move was also to quite literally put the faces of the world’s great innovators on their brand with the “Think Different” campaign—again associating the brand itself as the natural heir to a long line of personalities—and iconic faces—who shook the world.
More importantly, Apple is no longer building the kind of great products they used to. Quality has significantly degraded since Jobs left the company. Many of Apple’s once ardent devotees are now asking “What’s happened to Apple?,” while Quora and Reddit fill up with increasingly anxious discussions about Apple’s end-users experiencing a notable quality decline. Tom’s Guide actually phrased it as a veritable “quality control problem.”
Astonishingly enough, Apple hasn’t lost any of its customers despite the fact that product quality has declined. In fact, Apple’s customer base continues to grow due to its phenomenal brand equity. Indeed, in July 2022, Apple’s brand rose 55% and shot to the top of the list of the World’s Most Valuable Brands, eclipsing Amazon and Google. Hold on to your seats—Apple’s brand is now estimated to be worth over $971 billion! It may very soon achieve the status of the first trillion-dollar brand.
The Top 10 Most Valuable Brands in the World— 2022
What Apple’s brand story shows us is that when brand persona is developed correctly, a customer actually prefers to buy a brand rather than a product. The brand becomes the lynchpin holding a company together—elevating it above and beyond competitor reach, increasing barriers to entry, and, dare I say it, even saving the company from its own natural decline. For these reasons, it becomes clear that organizations should make developing their brand persona a high priority and take the process seriously because failing to do so means you will never develop the emotional currency to attract customers and the brand stickiness necessary to keep them.
So what are some simple things you can do to start developing your brand persona? Below I provide a worksheet with a series of exercises you can easily complete to help get your persona on track. Brands are never developed in isolation, but this checklist is useful when those in the marketing department at a small business or startup begin having strategic brand discussions. For the activities on this worksheet to result in success, the marketing team should go into a room together and brainstorm using these questions as a jumping off point.
Brainstorm and then select five words that best describe your company’s personality. Here are 25 of the top words many companies use when developing their brand persona:
Top Brand Persona Traits
This list is not exhaustive and is presented merely as a starting point. Again, you’ll feel a strong desire to select more than five attributes, but selecting more than five would be missing the point of this exercise. Narrowing down your personality into five traits will help your brand prioritize and simplify its message. Do the tough work and be ruthless about eliminating attributes that aren’t a priority. When you start the exercise you’ll have 20 or 30 characteristics, but when you end you’ll have just five.
When you’re done selecting five attributes, then narrow the list down to one word which best represents the brand you want to build. It will be this word that drives your brand personality while the other four words you selected will serve as supporting attributes.
Select the top three colors that you believe connote the primary attribute you selected in the previous exercise. Colors are essential for conveying mood and emotion. Every color is either warm or cool depending where it is on the spectrum and all colors are associated with specific attributes. Blue, for example, is associated with trust and stability. Many top brands choose blue for a reason. Red is associated with passion and energy. Green is associated with health, vitality and often wealth. Here is a breakdown of colors and the qualities they are commonly associated with:
Select three animals that best approximate the top qualities you chose in the first exercise. Yes, I know. This sounds weird and totally non-scientific—and guess what? It is. But trust me. This is a painful and sometimes embarrassing activity to perform, but it can really help you to zoom in on the image you want your company or organization to project. Are you a car company or do you make running shoes? Why not select a lithe, but fast animal like jaguar or panther? Are you a construction company? Why not select a beaver, known for being a master builder? Are you a school, academy or university? Why not select an elephant known for its wisdom and memory? Are you a toy company? Why not select a playful otter or red panda?
Alternate exercise: three celebrities—movie star, musician, sports star etc—that also best approximate your brand personality. Does your company sell clothing or fashion? Why not select Audrey Hepburn or Nicole Kidman, who are both sophisticated and known as fashion icons. Is your company a non-profit or does it sell music? Why not select James Dean or other celebrities known for being rebellious and cool? Is your company a tech company, which needs to convey speed and ruthless efficiency, why not choose Daniel Craig or other actors known for playing 007. You get the picture.
Select three songs for your personality soundtrack. When your brand speaks, what tone should it strike? As your company grows, you’ll produce marketing events where you will literally have to orchestrate music. But we don’t have to think about this exercise literally. We just need to imagine that every brand touch-point from a business card, to an email, to a billboard all convey tone. Great brands have mastered the art of tone and they use it to their advantage. Is your organization's tone somber and sincere? Soaring and joyful? Or cheeky and whimsical? What music would you set the soundtrack of your brand personality’s life to?
Finally, try to write down how your brand personality speaks by drafting potential microcopy your ultimate brand persona would say. Your personality voice is what people mean when they say, “brand voice.” For example, how would your brand personality say hello? Is it “Hello”, “Hi”, “Hey,” “W’sup?”, “How’s it Going?” or “Good morning!” How formal or informal would your persona speak if it could? How intimate would it communicate? How enthusiastic and unenthusiastic would it talk? Would it speak in exclamation points or question marks? Is it irreverent or deadly serious? While brand voice is more than just the marketing copy a company drafts, the voice of a brand personality has a huge impact on how the brand is perceived. It also determines whether its audience engages with the brand and develops an affinity for it.
Brand Voice Matrix
After you complete your worksheet and hold your workshop, it may be helpful to see how well the brand persona you’ve developed matches up with the 12 archetypes of personality or the 12 universal mythic characters.
Each one of these mythic characters begins with a core attribute: (1) Structure, (2) Spirituality, (3) Connection, or (4) Recognition.
From there, every archetype owns a secondary attribute, such as freedom, belonging, or power. See the complete list below.
The 12 persona archetypes are:
Ruler: The ruler is primarily associated with control and the color blue
Creator/Artist: The creator is primarily associated with innovation and green-blue
Sage: The sage is primarily associated with knowledge and green
Innocent: The innocent is primarily associated with safety and blue-green
Explorer: The explorer is primarily associated with freedom and yellow-green
Rebel: The rebel is primarily associated with liberation and green-yellow
Hero: The hero is primary associated with mastery and red-yellow
Wizard: The wizard or magician is primarily associated with power and yellow
Jester: The jester is primary associated with pleasure and red
Everyman: The everyman is primarily associated with belonging and the color purple
Lover: The lover is primarily associated with intimacy and orange-red
Caregiver: And finally, the caregiver is primarily associated with service and red-blue
The more your brand personality can be seen as a variation on a mythic archetype the closer you’ll be to developing the brand as a “person” and putting a face on your organization.
The beauty of using these archetypes is that once you know what personality your brand has, you can easily determine your brand color and voice.
You now have everything you need to start building a phenomenal brand persona. You know what a brand persona is and why it's important for your organization to have one. We’ve also provided a worksheet with a simple 5-step process for developing your unique and powerful brand persona. If your team starts this worksheet and completes these simple steps, you’ll be able to develop your brand persona and take the first steps toward creating a brand that will enable you to connect with your audience, acquire customers, and keep them for life.
Want to jumpstart your brand personality now? Why not download our FREE Brand Persona and Brand Personality Worksheet? This worksheet provides a 5-step workshop for you and/or your marketing team to help craft a unique brand personality quickly.
However, doing this kind of work is not for the faint of heart, and we understand that you may need help developing your brand persona. Verge is an expert at developing and managing brand.
We’ve worked with some of the largest brands in the world and helped to develop award-winning brands. Verge can help you to quickly and easily develop your brand and we can also help lead your company through this workshop to teach you how to develop it yourself. Schedule a free consultation today.