Connecting a brand with its intended audience has never been more difficult.
Every brand points to their unique difference, which often looks very similar to the unique difference of the competition.
To grab the attention of your audience, your brand needs personality appeal, and that’s where your brand persona comes in.
In this article you’ll learn what a brand persona is and how to create one that turns the heads of your audience.
How To Create An Engaging Brand Persona
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What Is A Brand Persona?
Brand persona is the human character that your brand communicates with. It’s developed through a series of elements including
Personality traits
Tone Of Voice
Language Profile
Personalised Outlook
Visual image
Each of these elements come together to represent how the brand wants to be seen in the market through the way it communicates.
A brand persona is the human representation of the brands existence and the personification its engagement.
Why Does Your Brand Need A Human Persona?
Today, we live in the era of the human brand and it’s no longer enough to broadcast information in the hope that the message will stick.
Monologue is the old way of brand communication. The present and the future is dialogue, with the brand listening to the consumer as much as directing messages towards them.
The modern consumer has a powerful voice that didn’t exist 30 years ago.
These consumers don’t just want two-way communication, they want their brands to speak to them in a way that feels familiar and connects with who they are as people.
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How Do People Connect With Brands?
As people, we connect with other people through their behavioural traits.
We’re drawn to traits that feel familiar and either mirror our own or represent something we want but don’t have.
This all happens on a primitive level through our ancient reptilian brain and its based on our instinct for survival.
If something feels familiar, it represents safety so we’re drawn towards it. If something feel unfamiliar, it represents danger and we push back from it.
This primitive behaviour plays out every day in every market as brands attempt to engage consumers to buy their products and services.
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Brand Persona Vs Buyer Persona
Often confused, brand personas and buyer personas are distinctly different but critically intertwined.
A buyer persona is a fictional character that represents who the audience is from their psychographic behaviours to their personality traits.
The brand persona is a fictional character that represents who the brand is from their personality traits to their outlook on life.
In other words, the buyer persona personifies the buyer while the brand persona personifies the brand. Once the buyer persona is developed and understood, a brand persona can be developed to appeal.
How Do You Develop A Brand Persona?
Although the brand persona is effectively the development of the brand as a person, its not complicated.
In a nutshell its about understanding who the audience is, what they want and what they’re attracted to, and developing a personality to give them exactly that.
Here’s how
1. Identify Your Most Influential Buyer Personas
Before you can develop a brand persona, you need to understand who the audience is (i.e. you need to develop a buyer persona).
The brand persona is designed specifically to appeal to who the audience is.
Without a clearly defined audience persona, the brand wouldn’t appeal to anyone specifically.
2. Extract The Most Influential Traits
Your brand may have many different buyer personas all representing different market segments or different types of people within the same segment.
In order to develop a personality to appeal to the brands customers, you need to extract the personality traits that are most dominant amongst your most influential buyer personas.
At, most pick three of your most influential buyer persona’s to work from.
3. Identify The Role They Want From Your Brand
Once you’ve identified the characteristic patterns from your most influential personas, its time to define the role your audience wants from your brand.
Do they want you to inspire them, lead them, guide them, support them or do they have another role in mind for the brand they want to help them?
Understanding what they want from a relationship with your brand is critical in defining a personality that will display those desired traits.
4. Align Your Brand To An Archetype
When you’ve identified their dominant traits and the role they want from your brand you can then align your brand to a brand archetype.
Archetypes, developed first by Carl Jung in the early 20th century, we later taken into the realm of branding by Margaret Mark and Carol Person in their breakthrough book “The Hero & The Outlaw”.
The framework represents the 12 archetypical personalities that represent all people. Aligning your brand with one or two of these personalities gives your brand direction for personality development.
5. Define Brand Tone Of Voice And Language
Armed with the personality traits of your archetype or archetypal mix (a combination of two archetypes), you can begin to define the tone of voice your brand will use.
Coupled with the language profile of your brand, your brand voice shapes how the brand will communicate to the audience, the types of words it will use and the traits it will display across all platforms.
6. Expand Your Brand Personality
Although your brand has personality direction through the archetypal framework, a language profile and a tone of voice, it’s not yet a full-developed personality.
In order to create a personality that feels real, it needs to be developed out so the brand has an opinion, attitudes and an outlook on life. Only through this level of detail will the personality actually feel like a real person.
7. Use Your Brand Persona To Guide
Having taken the time to develop out your brand persona, you’re now armed with a tool that will help the brand connect on a human level.
It’s important to note that at this stage, you still haven’t developed any messages or defined exactly what your brand will say to its audience (That comes through the brand’s communication strategy).
The brand persona doesn’t define what the brand says. It defines the way it says it and is used as a tool for consistency across all brand communication so the audience fells a sense of familiarity.
Over To You
We all understand what it feels like when we hear a familiar voice or a familiar accent in a place full of strangers.
We’re drawn to that sense of familiarity because as people we’re still very primitive and familiarity represents safety.
All brands are built through trust and if you can begin your relationships off on a foot of familiarity, you’re one foot ahead of the competition. Sometimes, that’s all you need.
Comment below and let me know your thoughts on brand personas, brand personality or generally connecting with your audience on a human level.
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