Building a Brand with Personality

Like humans, brands are designed to have their own unique personalities and human characteristics to make them more relatable and emotionally engaging.

In today’s insight, we will look at how important a well-defined brand personality is to your overall brand strategy and how it informs other crucial elements of your brand identity.

In B2B branding, discovering the company’s unique personality is one of the most important (and arguably influential) aspects of brand development. We’d also say it can be one of the most fun as well.

A brand’s personality sets the tone for a number of other elements. It informs thoughts about what principles (or behaviors) may help reflect the personality, it starts to inspire the voice and tone the verbal identity will take, and it can transform the direction of the visual identity. 

So, what is brand personality? The brand personality is usually a set of three to six human-like characteristics or attributes that people can consistently see and/or feel amplified throughout your brand experience.

Some branding firms use brand archetypes to help guide personality development.

Others sometimes lean on the Aaker Model, which classifies brand personalities into five buckets: sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, and ruggedness.

From our experience, some of these methods are limiting and not always practical in really thinking through and developing a unique and authentic personality. 

At Flo., we like to explore an exercise of cards against humanity (without all the profanities) to help organizations identify the personality traits they are and those they are not. 

Uncovering the brand’s personality can take time. Generally, for those who really know who they are (or want to be), they complete the exercise in ~30 minutes. On the other hand, we’ve had teams take up to two hours to narrow down and agree. 

The two-hour debate is usually not favored for the executive types, but it can provide invaluable insights into how much (or how little) your team knows who you are. 

Take a look at the cards below:

If you haven’t completed this exercise before, would you know what defines your company? Do you think everyone on your team would answer the same?

Once the ink dries and the brand personality is set, it will serve as your lens to validate the other brand elements. For example, if you select “bold” as an element of your brand personality, here are some ways it might impact your identity:

• “Be Bold” might become one of your guiding principles to reinforce the brand through behavior.
• Your verbal identity may lean more heavily on short, punchy statements.
• Your visual identity may embrace bold visual elements and/or colors to reflect your boldness.

This one personality trait will, of course, be balanced with the others you select, but ultimately, the brand personality is one of the most important strategy elements to get right. It should be based not only on who you are today but also on who you want to be in the future. Just as importantly, it should resonate with your potential customers and audiences. Being bold, just to be bold, doesn’t mean it translates to value for your audience.

A strong brand personality establishes meaningful connections that build trust with your audience, drive loyalty, and lead to long-term success.