4 Ways to Show Your Brand’s Personality

Editor's Note: Take a look at our featured best practice, Brand Assessment Tool (Excel workbook). Use the Brand Assessment Tool to evaluate your organization from a branding perspective. This is a beneficial tool to utilize when conducting a self-assessment audit. In the Brand Assessment Tool, the first step is to rate your compliance with best practices across the following key dimensions: [read more]

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A lot has been written about brand personality, but for companies focused on creating the best product or service in their industry, crafting and showing your personality can seem like an unnecessary undertaking. So why take on the extra task? The answer is simple: to increase your revenue. A brand personality is the set of traits a consumer identifies with the company. A positive brand personality can increase the awareness about a company’s product or service, creating new customers, and increase consumer loyalty, creating repeat customers.

According to the Harvard Business Review, 64 percent of customers report that the primary reason they have a relationship with a brand is shared values. Before a consumer can connect with your brand, they must be able to identify those values, which is where crafting and promoting your company personality is important. Here are four ways to show your brand’s personality:

1. Educate

After you have identified your company’s values, you now need to educate both your employees and your customers about what you do and what your values are. Look at Amway, a global health and beauty direct-selling company that has identified its core value as “helping people live better lives.” The company uses its employee trainings, website, social media pages, etc. to teach about how they aim to live up to this core value. Creating this consistent message and then actively educating their workforce and customers about their personality gives consumers the opportunity to connect with the brand in a way they otherwise wouldn’t.

2. Humanize Your Brand

A great way to show off your company’s personality is through the people who determine it — your employees. Putting a human face to your brand will help customers feel a personal connection to your company. At the very least, put photos of your staff on your website, but you can also include them in your market materials and on your social media channels. Johnsonville’s ad campaign where employees dream up commercials is an excellent example of using employees to tell the story of a brand. These commercials reflect Johnsonville’s brand value: a company where employees are a family who take pride in their product.

3. Consistency is Key

No matter how you identify your company personality — fun, modern, sophisticated, sincere, friendly, edgy, etc. — you must be consistent in communicating that message to consumers. Be sure that your voice is internally and externally consistent across all marketing and interactions with consumers. A consistent brand experience builds trust and loyalty. ZocDoc, an online service for booking doctor appointments, communicates its friendly, easy company personality through every consumer touch point. Its mascot is a cartoon doctor that is featured across every social media account and on the website, and every communication is done in a conversational and playful tone.

4. Be Authentic

Above all, consumers want brands that strike them as authentic. In fact, according to a 2017 Sprout Social survey, 86 percent of people surveyed said that they value brand honesty above all else. Dove began it’s Real Beauty campaign in 2004, with the mission statement that “beauty should be a source of confidence and not anxiety.” Since then, its communications and actions have all reflected this mission (including taking stances and fundraising for issues women care about), and this perceived authenticity has helped Dove’s sales skyrocket.

Through education, humanization, and consistent and authentic messaging, communicating your brand personality will only improve your bottom line. Every company has a personality, but to really connect with consumers, you have to know how to show it off.

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