FAQ | What is Brand Persona and How Does it Effect my Business?

Character is defined by Cambridge Dictionary, as the particular combinations of qualities in a person or place that makes them different from others. A character is often synonymous with the public face, identity, disposition, nature, reputation, and for our uses in the article, persona.?

Brand persona is your company’s edified embodiment, a personification of your company. Stated another way, brand persona adds soul, a humanized disposition, to everything that your consumers interact with. The brand persona acts as a tool for creating relatable and supportive interactions with your buyers and ultimately, your brand’s largest addressable market. In turn, your brand persona creates further reach and connection to potential buyers, and ultimately a “reliable and realistic representation” , of your company. This can be a complex but truly worthwhile process. When your brand persona is consistent, authentic and intentional, your consumers see your company and brand as more trustworthy , with greater brand equity , which means more engagement, profit, and greater customer loyalty .

Your brand persona determines how your client or consumer sees your company. Your company may have multiple customer personas, but your brand persona is the company’s public personality that all applicable customer groups can relate to, and lean on to solve the problem that your consumer has. The brand persona is inclusive of your brand’s voice aka. style of communications. Brand persona also includes your brand values, personality, mission, imagery, etc., and any other publicly perceived brand aspects.

Using the brand persona method encompasses aspects of:

• Brand identity: color scheme, logos, typography style, visual elements
• Brand meaning & positioning: the company’s specific meaning in the buyer’s minds and what goal the consumer achieves by using the brand
• Brand differentiation & unique selling proposition (USP): why what your company does matters to your buyers
• Market segmentation: demographics and psychographics of your customer groups and how appropriate they are for your products or services

When I think brand, I usually think of irrefutable brand leaders Fenty, Apple, IKEA, Nike, and Uniqlo. These companies are undeniable in image and visual consistency and cohesiveness. Across all customer interactions, their brands are apparent, and their digital and physical personas reliably illustrate their brand values.

As you prepare to launch, you may be loaded down with jargon, and seeking to understand what is necessary and can be skipped. By developing a brand persona, you are able to put the more intricate areas of brand development to work for you, without digging into everything that a trained marketer would need to understand, in the way.?

If you develop a persona for your brand, this process may include only you, if you are a solo-entrepreneur, or small business owner. This is perfectly fine, and may even be easier with less input to include. However, if you are doing this process for a business with multiple employees, it will be helpful to include all applicable stakeholders in the discussion. This may include the marketing team or consultants, and sales teams because they directly interact with you product, know your customers, and understand buyer motivations from direct experience. This process may even include your customers, directly. The goal is to have a comprehensive view of your brand, so include whomever you feel would be a best fit to get that perspective.?

To develop a brand persona, I use the proprietary six step framework listed below. I will be going into detail and providing support worksheets in a future blog post. The six steps include:

1. Understand your customers.
2. Curate intentional customer personas for each target market or buyer group.
3. Evaluate where your buyer groups align and depart from each other.?
4. Develop an applicable brand persona that meshes well with all of them.?
5. Create clear guidelines on how the persona shows up, where it shows up, and when it shows up, AND test it out!
6. Achieve persona consistency across all business functions and platforms.

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Originally posted HERE!