What is Brand Persona? Many companies have still not developed what is one of the fundamental foundations of their brand identity.
Brand Persona is distinctive and built over time to create long-term brand equity. From a target audience standpoint, these impressions merge to form an overall concept of what your customer or prospect can expect from your brand.
When the target audience has clarity and understands what a brand stands for, it increases the strength of the customer relationship and differentiates brands from their competitors.
One of the key measures of a brand’s strength is a customer’s ability to bond with that brand. Bonding creates loyalty to a brand so that the customer can directly identify with what a brand stands for. When customers identify with a brand, they feel the brand is more meaningful and valuable to them personally.
Brand Persona Elements
- Brand values – principles that guide your brand’s actions.
- Brand tone – the way your brand communicates to your target audience – is it humorous, casual, more formal, serious?… whatever is chosen it needs to be consistent.
- Brand voice – the specific language and style your brand uses to communicate which should reflect the brand’s values and tone.
- Brand appearance – visual elements – ie. logo, colour schemes, and design elements are all elements that should be cohesive and consistent, creating a solid and recognizable brand identity.
- Brand story – the brand’s history, mission, and value narrative.
Brand Persona refers specifically to the way a brand represents itself and creates a visual and emotional representation of your brand that unifies your entire company—including values you represent, what is most important to you and drives your business —through its appearance and interactions. The more a brand acts like a real person, the better customers will relate.
The strongest brands are those brands with the most well-defined personalities. Think of top brands that quickly come to mind: B2B – IBM, FedEx; and B2C: Nike and Apple. These brands have differentiated themselves by the way they relate to customers and by the way they address their customers.
Developing a Brand Persona is the first step of a strategic Branding Strategy. Understanding your target audience’s needs, desires and motivations is key. Understanding your audience is based on research which can be executed through surveys, collecting industry data, analyzing existing customer data and gathering competitor data and identifying strengths and weaknesses throughout.
Emphasizing specific Brand Persona traits will strengthen competitive position and more readily enable your target market to identify with your brand through an emotional connection. It will also differentiate you from your competitors as you consistently maintain your memorable identify across all customer touchpoints (website, social media, advertising, events and etc).
Is your company’s Brand Persona clearly defined? If not contact us today for a free consultation on how to get started by clicking this link – Let’s Go!