How To Express Your Brand Personality
The secret to a successful brand is to express your company personality through your branding. Having said that it’s not so straightforward; your company personality should be developed from your existing customer base and your target market.
Ask yourself a couple of questions…
Who are your customers?
How do they use your products?
What do they relate to?
What visual messages will resonate with them?
If you can answer these you’re on the way to knowing the kind of personality your brand should have. Ideally those who buy your products should be able to see themselves and what they want to be in your branding.
Adding personality to your branding is how the brand communicates with the outside world, this can be writing style, design style, colour scheme, or, if you’re lucky enough to have the contacts, celebrity endorsement.
Of course for most businesses out there, relying on celebrity endorsement isn’t an option, which is why we need to get into the customer’s mindset and create a company personality through your branding.
Before launching a marketing campaign to express your company personality through your branding, be sure of what that personality and message is – how you want it to be perceived by your customers; how do you want them to feel? Think of your brand as a person; what are their characteristics? Are they adventurous, helpful, intellectual, comforting, brave? You get the idea!
When you have your list of keywords, try to associate them with a brand personality archetype. For example:-
Jester = fun and playful
Hero = adventurous and brave
Once you’ve finished you will see the three personality archetypes that the most of your keywords associate with, these should represent the personality traits of your company. This is a great exercise to create a persona around your brand, and the more people in your team that you can involve in this the better, so as to get as many perspectives on the brand as possible.
So, how can you express that personality?
Now that you’ve established what your brand personality is, it is important to deliver every aspect of your company through this personality; from email signatures, to your website, though to your printed packaging and promotional merchandise like printed bags – which we do a great range of, by the way!
Even the email content sent out by you and your employees is important to your branding and company personality. If your business is all about leisure and fun, responding to an email in a very formal manner doesn’t resonate with your brand and can be off-putting to the enquirer. In this instance the reply should be factually correct but delivered in a friendly fun manner.
Social media is another area where it’s essential you remain in keeping with your brand – in fact, it’s one of the best platforms to give personality to your brand. You know your target audience, so adapt your tone of voice on social media to work with that – if they are sporty teenagers keep your posts lively and energetic. If you are a B2B company, be aware of your professionalism even if your company personality is a little more laid-back.
Your website is probably one of the most obvious places to express your company personality through your branding. It’s usually when building a new website that the whole concept of a branding personality raises its head. It’s critical to your branding success online to get this right. Don’t be who you are not, proclaim to offer a service that you can’t, or attract totally the wrong audience simply because you didn’t think things through.
Promotional printing is an integral part of your branding and marketing. If you are launching a new product or adding a new service to your business the best way of getting the news out there is with a promotional campaign. Remember that the company personality needs to shine through; whether that’s in the kind of competition you run, the giveaways you use, or how you spread the word. Commit to your target audience and what you want your brand to be!
Printed bags are a great promotional tool. Here at The Printed Bag Shop we have quite a selection to choose from, plus a very talented design team who can work with your branding and company personality to transform a plain bag into a super printed bag helping to spread your message far and wide!