Brand personality and identity metrics are essential tools for brand management. They help you understand how your brand is perceived by your customers and how it stands out from your competitors. In this article, we will explain what brand personality and identity are, how to measure them, and why they matter for your brand strategy.
Brand personality is the set of human traits and characteristics that are associated with your brand. It reflects how your brand communicates, behaves, and expresses itself. For example, some brands may have a playful, adventurous, or humorous personality, while others may have a sophisticated, reliable, or professional personality. Brand personality helps you create an emotional connection with your customers and differentiate your brand from others.
By adding in an emotional tie from your brand to your audience or community, you create an extra strong connection for what you're known for and what people can expect from you. These personality attributes or personas can also help when you're unsure how to approach potentially sensitive subjects if you interpret them through the lens of your brand.
Brand personality is more than descriptors. When a brand is able to identify how they want to be perceived, personality can guide decisions that influence how they show up in the world.
Brand personality is like the unique character and charm that a brand carries, making it feel relatable and almost like a friend. It's all about the human qualities and traits attributed to the brand, shaping how people perceive and connect with it on a more personal level.
Brand identity is the visual and verbal representation of your brand personality. It includes your brand name, logo, slogan, colors, fonts, images, tone of voice, and other elements that convey your brand message and values. Brand identity helps you create a consistent and memorable impression of your brand across all touchpoints and channels.
One thing I find it useful for company to be recognized is to have a custom graphical pattern made in relation with the logo/fonts. Once loyal customers familiarize the pattern, the brands can be recognized even with the absent of the logo.
There are many ways customers identify your brand. Brand identity extends far beyond just visual and verbal. Many brands use sound (sonic branding) or even smell and touch to develop recognizable assets associated with their experiences.
Brand identity is like a brand's personal fingerprint – it's the way a brand presents itself to the world. People recognise a brand like they recognise a familiar face, i.e. through a combination of distinctive visuals, memorable experiences, and a unique personality that leaves a lasting impression.
There are different methods and frameworks to measure brand personality, but one of the most widely used is the Brand Personality Scale (BPS) developed by Jennifer Aaker. The BPS consists of five dimensions: sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, and ruggedness. Each dimension has a set of traits that describe how a brand is perceived. For example, sincerity includes traits such as honest, genuine, and friendly, while excitement includes traits such as daring, spirited, and imaginative. To measure your brand personality, you can use surveys, interviews, or focus groups to ask your customers to rate your brand on these traits and compare them with your competitors.
One memorable experience involved conducting surveys and interviews to gauge our brand's personality. Through these interactions, we uncovered intriguing insights about how customers perceived our brand traits like reliability and innovation were highlighted consistently. This data was invaluable, guiding our strategies to accentuate our brand's strengths and refine our messaging for a more resonant connection. One impactful approach I found useful was leveraging social listening tools. Monitoring online conversations and sentiments around our brand on how our personality traits were being perceived in the market. This tool aided in adapting our strategies swiftly and staying aligned with our audience's expectations.
To measure your brand identity, you need to evaluate how well your brand elements align with your brand personality and strategy. You can use tools such as brand audits, brand guidelines, and brand scorecards to assess your brand identity. A brand audit is a comprehensive analysis of your brand's current performance, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. A brand guideline is a document that defines your brand's vision, mission, values, personality, identity, and voice. A brand scorecard is a tool that tracks and measures your brand's performance on key indicators such as awareness, recognition, loyalty, and advocacy.
One of the ways to measure brand identity is to ask loyal customer to identify one of few business collaterals with the logo being covered. This will put the messaging, the tone of voice, graphical elements such as patterns, colors, use of shapes etc. to the test. How much customer can successfully recognize the better.
Brand personality and identity matter because they influence how your customers feel, think, and act towards your brand. They help you build trust, loyalty, and advocacy among your customers and attract new ones. They also help you create a unique and distinctive position in the market and stand out from your competitors. By measuring and managing your brand personality and identity, you can ensure that your brand delivers on its promise and meets your customers' expectations.
Brand personality should drive the design of experiences that connect with your customers and drive business outcomes. By creating a strong, distinct personality and consistently bringing it to life in your brand identity, your organization can build trust and loyalty with your customers.
In practice, while determining brand personality allows for ease in communications from a wide variety of the brand and marketing team, it's important to utilize the brand's core pillars to harmonize with the brand's personality when considering potential partnerships and real life integration. Despite any changes in personnel, a strong determination of brand personality ensures that there will be consistency in messaging and customer interaction.
Of course it does matter, speaking from my past working experience with a company which has vague vision and mission and lack of clarity in their brand identity, they do not have a brand guideline, we don't even know the tone of voice hence most of the work is being done vaguely without distinction and being rejected with a subjective view from stakeholder. Without a proper brand personality and identity, it does not only affect how your customers view a company, it affect the company internally as employee is consider the company's internal brand ambassadors