Recently updated on November 2nd, 2023 at 09:26 am
Brand personality is often an understated aspect of a company. But no matter what business goal you’re trying to achieve, brand personality can save you from failing at every hurdle.
Who was born with a personality?
Identifying your personality can be more complex than you can imagine. How would you describe yourself?
Each of us has varying personalities and attitudes that depend on every situation. If you’re running a business, you’ll know that customers have varying preferences that determine their consumer behaviour. But generally, consumers behave in one of two ways – either through the psychodynamic or developmental approach.
The psychodynamic approach explains that consumer behaviour is determined by genetics. On the other hand, the developmental approach states that consumers learn such behaviour over time through experience. But how are these relevant to your brand personality?
Brand personality refers to a set of human characteristics that you attribute to your brand. If you have a consistent set of traits that your customers can always relate to, then you are on the right track. After all, consumers tend to move towards a brand identity that matches their personality.
You can use these personality traits to understand and manage marketing practice, especially in the following areas:
- Brand choice
- Advertising
- Product selection
- Shopping behaviour
- Loyalty
When you become more familiar with how people can connect with your brand, you’ll open up more opportunities for your company’s growth.
5 Basic Personality Dimensions
At this point, you must already know that brand and human personality have common grounds. But you must familiarise yourself first with the five basic personality dimensions:
- Openness to experience
People love to experience new things and find ways to make their life more exciting. So, you need to be creative to keep that excitement and spark their interest in your products or services.
- Conscientiousness
Being organised keeps society intact. People don’t want confusing and messed up rules that have no consistency. As a brand owner, you must learn to align your values with people’s interests and beliefs.
- Extroversion
- Agreeableness
One thing that sets humans apart from other beings is our ability to empathise. Break your barrier and connect with them by positioning your brand voice in a more personal way.
- Neuroticism
Everyone has problems to solve. As a business owner, you must identify and solve those problems for your customers. Keep in mind that customers are more inclined to sincere brands and not those who are only after their money.
Personality and Purchasing
- Need for affect
- Impulsiveness
- Need for uniqueness
- Susceptibility to interpersonal influence
Sometimes, people prefer things that offer social benefits. Hence, they’ll also be eager to know where your brand stands and see if it matches the social presence they want to maintain.
Brand Personality and Strategy
Now that you know how different traits and consumer behaviour relate to each other, it’s time for you to learn the dimensions of brand personality:
- Sincerity
- Excitement
- Competence
- Sophistication
- Ruggedness
Familiarising yourself with these brand personality traits will help you identify the best strategy to improve your public presence. It’s time to step up your game and join the upper class!
Case Study - Red Bull
If you’re managing a start-up business, you might be struggling to find the best brand strategy to showcase your brand personality. But remember that you can always refer to famous brands and analyse the techniques that help them soar to greater heights.
Take Red Bull, for example. Among the five dimensions of brand personality, they chose to focus on the excitement. It’s the perfect trait for their business since they target professional athletes and fun-loving people.
Overall, Red Bull has a courageous, outgoing, exciting, and hyper-energetic brand personality. This company is an example of excitement brands, which have daring, imaginative, and spirited traits.
It might not even be necessary to mention these traits to describe Red Bull. After all, they have developed a strong brand identity where these are the first things that come to your mind when you hear their brand name.
But what about other businesses without a brand personality? Family Drug Support Australia and Better Health Channel are two companies that focus on medical and healthcare services. These are services that most people need, so it might be the reason why they didn’t focus on building their brand personality.
However, keep in mind that it does not work for most businesses. You might be dealing with competitors already dominating your market industry, and you wouldn’t want to get left behind in the corner.
Key takeaways
Now that you know how brand personality can scale up your business, it’s time for you to start taking action. Whether you’re a spirited, imaginative, or sophisticated brand, you need to showcase your brand personality as soon as possible. As a branding agency having brand presentation as one of our competencies, our Spark team can help you nail this hurdle. After all, we aim to build a brand that connects well with its customers by having a deeper level of understanding of your business goals.
