Brand personas: A complete guide to humanizing your company
What is a brand persona?
Brand personas are the human characteristics, values, and personality traits attributed to a company that shape how customers emotionally connect with and relate to it. They serve as a strategic foundation, guiding how a brand communicates, behaves, and differentiates itself at every customer touchpoint. Building a strong brand persona is a core part of how companies earn lasting recognition and loyalty. Brand management is the continuous practice of shaping how audiences perceive, experience, and trust your brand, including the management of logos, imagery, colors, voice, messaging, and differentiation.
What makes a good or effective brand persona?
A strong brand persona is usually relatable to a customer base and makes them feel as if your brand is just like them, personality-wise. If you’re active, hard-working, outgoing, sympathetic, environmentally-aware, or friendly, you want a company to mirror these traits.
With this in mind, aim your messaging and goals at the people who are likely to try your products. For example, if you are selling food products designed for on-the-go eating, you might try to create something that embodies hardworking, busy people who prioritize getting things done over sitting down and relaxing during a big meal. When customers think of your company as a mirror image of their character, they buy into the idea that the product you create is the right one for them.
Why do I need one?
Your brand persona gives your company a chance to have powerful relationships with customers. What will customers visualize when they see your logo and products or hear your jingle? Will yours be one that portrays the positive values, mission and goals of your company? Remember that if you fail to strive for the right identity, it’s inevitable that the wrong one will be bestowed upon you. Make sure you guide yours from day one.
To see how powerful it is for a company, imagine a young girl and her mother are shopping for volleyball equipment. They see two different brands are selling gear. One company represents a tough, hard-nosed athletic girl who fights to win every game. The other brand’s persona is absent and gives no insight into their brand identity. It seems obvious from this example that the right persona makes companies successful, especially over their competitors.
Creating distinct awareness and concrete understanding
It’s not always easy to know what your brand persona is. Fortunately, there are a few ways to work with your teams in order to better understand it. The easiest way to help everyone in your company visualize your persona is by having them imagine seeing a personified version of your brand. What would your brand look like if you closed your eyes and made them human? Would they be short, tall, rude, friendly, exciting, boring? Take these cues as hints to what you’re doing right or wrong and go from there.
Once your brand becomes more concrete, spread the ideal version of it across your company to ensure everyone continues to work towards spreading it at all times. The only way to maintain one is by having all team members aware of it.
Remember that your brand persona not only signifies important values of your company, it also helps customers choose you over your competitors. Keep this in mind as you build your future campaigns.
