So it’s time to bring your brand to life right? Then you best learn how to develop brand personality for that brand.

If you’re building a brand for yourself or a client, then you’ve kind of got the notion already that you’re going to need to find a way to connect with them.

There are many ways a strategic brand can engage their audience but when it comes to MUST HAVE’s, personality is top of the list.

In this article, I’ll show you what brand personality is, why it’s necessary and how to develop brand personality for your brand.

What Is Brand Personality?

Well, to put it simply, brand personality is

the collection of characteristics with which your brand is expressed in the market.

The goal of developing and expressing a brand personality is to make your brand more relatable, more likable and ultimately more human.

All brand managers need to deliver messages to their audience to express what the brand is about and give them a reason to choose their brand over their competitors’ brands.

Although “what” messages each brand put out into the market is critical, “how” these messages are put out is becoming increasingly important.

What Are Brand Archetypes?

Archetypes, coined by well renowned Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung in the early 20^th century, are a framework of 12 personalities, which represent the personification of all human personalities.

We all have core human desires that vary in different levels from one person to the next.

Different personalities and characteristics increase different desires.

The level of our desire and the combined characteristics of another personality will determine whether or not we’re attracted to them.

Though Archetypes have been around for some time, they’ve only been introduced into branding as “brand archetypes” in the last 20 years which has coincided with the demand by consumers for more “human brands”.

Brand archetypes use the archetype framework to first identify the personality of the brand’s audience, and then develop a personality most likely to attract or appeal to that audience.

How To Develop A Human Brand

Archetypes are a tool for brand builders to use, to inject personality into their brands to ultimately make them more relatable.

Building a strategic brand starts with understanding who the audience is. When you have a highly detailed audience persona, you can then identify which of the 12 archetypes are most aligned to that audience.

Once you’ve aligned your audience to an archetype, you can then identify an archetype (or combination of archetypes – archetypal mix) best suited to appeal to the personality of your audience.

This is how you use archetypes to develop a personality for your brand.

But the archetype is only the starting point for your brand personality. We still need to make it human.

The framework gives you a solid foundation and will outline the characteristics, fears and underlying desires of that human personality.

But the archetype doesn’t become human until it develops attitudes, ideas, opinions and behaviours of its own.

So let’s uncover how to develop brand personality with this 6-step template

Step 1:
Identify Your Audience

One of the first steps when developing a brand strategy is to get a crystal clear picture of your audience.

Build an audience persona using demographics and psychographics to narrow your target market and uncover the challenges and pain-points they’re navigating.

Only by understanding who they are can we understand their personality.

Step 2:
Assign Your Audience To An Archetype

Use the information you’ve gathered to identify the personality of your audience.

The psychographics you’ve gathered including their interests, likes, dislikes, hobbies, activities etc will shine a light on the type of person they are as well as their fears and desires.

This information will point to one of the 12 archetypes that they are most aligned with.

Step 3:
Identify Your Brand Archetype (Or Mix)

The information you’ve gathered on your audience including their fears, desires, characteristics and behaviours will shine a light on what they desire most.

Understanding the relationship you want your brand to have with your audience here is key.

You may want to connect with them by making them feel like they are the same or you might want to appeal through authority and expertise.

Once you’ve identified how you want to appeal, you can then identify one or a combination of two (two is the maximum) archetypes to act as the personality foundation.

Step 4:
Give Your Brand Personality Some Personality

Your archetype (or mix of archetypes) is only the baseline for your brand personality.

It provides the outline (or silhouette) of who your brand is becoming but it’s far from a polished human brand persona.

When your brand goes to market with its message, it needs to be armed with more than a handful of characteristics.

It needs attitudes, opinions, beliefs and behaviours developed from the desires and behaviours of the target audience.

The more your brand knows who it is, the more effectively it can deliver its message with conviction.

Step 5:
Bring Your Archetype To Life

Now you have a brand that knows who it is, you want to bring it to life visually.

You’re not looking to create a caricature or an actual persona to represent the brand in the market (unless of course that’s been determined in the brand strategy).

You want to give your persona a look and feel all on its own which will act as a guide and feed the brand expression.

Using the characteristics and behaviours you’re brand will communicate with, uncover an image (or multiple images) that best suits this personality.

This image will provide fuel for brand expression as a visual representation of the human brand persona can inject the brand expression with tangibility.

Step 6:
Infuse Your Messaging With Your Personality

Once you have your human brand persona including how it looks, feels, sounds and behaves you can then use this human brand persona throughout all brand expression from your emails to your website copy.

When your audience reads a social post which has been written by this persona, they will feel far more connected to it than a post written by a copywriter with no understanding of “who” the brand is.

This is the difference between “human brands” and “mannequin brands”.