BRAND PERSONA !!!

This is a visual representation of your brand personality. This is a visual human persona to specifically represent your brand personality. It's not for external communication though it can and probably will influence your external communication on your core message. What we want to achieve here is to have an image that captures the personality we want our brand to adopt through the height the body shape the hair the clothes the accessories and other visual expressions

Brand visual persona should look like they have the characteristics and the behaviours that we want our brand to have as well as your visual identity your visual persona will influence the look feel voice and tone of your brand. So, the human characteristics come through in every element giving you a much better chance at resonating on a human level.

So what you want to do is make a list of keywords that represent your personality including your characteristics and how someone with these characteristics might look then using various combinations of between three to five keywords we want to search google images and should our stock on any other library of images that we can find.

If you don't immediately find an image that represents your personality to a T. Look out for elements of the images that you see that you feel could work.

 So, for example

do they have tattoos.

What clothes are they wearing.

What accessories do they have.

What environments are they in so record these other keywords and add them to your search and continue.

If you have a very specific image in mind and you're struggling to find an image that represents that persona then you might need to use a mood board instead a mood board is where you capture images of different elements to represent your idea as a whole.

And when you look at that mood board you should be able to get a feel for what that brand personality might look like what you want as an end goal is to look at an image or a collection of images that quickly captures the personality you want your brand to display once you have your visual representation of your personality, you then want to bring out your verbal representation and you want to use the characteristics and the visual representation that you now have as direction for that tone of voice. You want your personality to be as realistic as possible. The more realistic your personality is the more likely it is that you'll start to develop feelings towards it first and foremost but then your audience can start to develop feelings towards it as well. Using your competitor research book grab a list of your competitors and visit their Web pages. Also look at the Web sites of your industry leaders including publications regulatory bodies and communities as well.

What we're looking for here are snippets of industry specific copy that you'll use to adjust and develop your brand voice around which includes the language and the tone that your brand will be speaking in.

Once you have a collection of snippets and bodies of copy you then want to rewrite that information with your characteristics and visual representation top of mind by asking the question how my brand wants to express this information based on how it feels now.

There are two points I want to jump on to here before we move on. Firstly, we're not writing copy here. This isn't for your Web site. we're certainly not ripping off the copy of your competitors. We're using industry specific sentences to draw out your brand's vocabulary and tone of voice that it will use to influence your core message. Now secondly I just referred to your brand in terms of how it feels and that's exactly what we need to be doing with our brand from here on in and we need to think of our brand as a person from here on in that it has a voice.

It has an opinion and has feelings and it has an outlook on the world. So, as we rewrite snippets, we want to record industry specific words that we would expect our brand to use.

We then want to expand on those words using a tool like power thesaurus.com just popping the words and look at the synonyms that it throws out and expand on that vocabulary and what we'd be left with is a list of industry specific words that we can then cherry pick based on the personality of our brand. We can cherry pick very specific industry words that we believe our brand should be using in their vocabulary. Now along with the vocabulary you also want to identify the tone of voice and the style with which your brand will be speaking. So, we want to ask the question Is there an attitude in the tone. Is it aggressive or soft spoken. Is it refined and articulate or is it gritty and rough. What about the formality being used. Is it exceptionally corporate. Does it use slang or is it simple and conversational. And what about the pitch is the pitch of the voice deep and intimidating or is it soft and seductive. So we want to pull out all of these considerations when talking about and listening to our brand and listening to how our brand is going to talk about its industry because these tools will help us to resonate with our audience on a much more human level than a corporate brand with no personality would.

More human the brand is; Brand more human for!

#stayinspired