Tweet

7 Tips for Developing a Brand Personality and Brand Personas for Your Business or Website

Written by: Catherine Kaputa

Article Overview: This article explains how to develop a brand personality for your company or products that will help you develop a unified brand image in all your branding from your logo to packaging to your website. the article also introduces the hot new concept of personas - developing fictional narrative bios to represent 2 or 3 key target markets. The article provides 7 tips for developing brand personas from Catherine Kaputa's new book, U R a Brand, How Smart People Brand Themselves for Business Success www.urabrand.com

7 Tips for Developing a Brand Personality and Brand Personas for Your Business or Website

7 Tips for Developing a Brand Personality and Brand Personas for Your Business or Website

By Catherine Kaputa

"Nothing is so powerful as an insight into human nature,
what compulsions drive a man, what instincts dominate his
action, even though his language so often camouflages what
really motivates him. For if you know these things about a
man you can touch him at the core of his being."
– Bill Bernbach, legendary advertising creative leader


In many ways, brands are like people. And, as I like to say
to my self-branding clients, people are like brands. Brands
take on human like traits as we become attached to them,
seek them out, and assign human personalities to them. After
all, like the friends we have, the brands we associate with
say something about us to the world outside (and maybe even
to ourselves).

Brand Personality

A popular element of creative testing has been to ask focus
groups, “If brand X were a famous person, who would it be?”
It can bevery revealing and provide helpful marketing
information. Often more telling than asking people a more
pointed question like, “Why do you like brand X? The
request for an analogy opens up inner beliefs and
connections about the brand in human terms that most people
can identify with.

If you’re an entrepreneur or involved in marketing, write
down your company’s brand personality to bring your brand
concept to life, and use it as a jumping off point as you
develop all the brand’s trappings – name, packaging,
advertising, web design, what have you

Brand Personas

The counterpoint to the brand’s personality is the customer
persona. Personas are customer archetypes written with a
rich narrative storyline kind of like a casting call for a
movie script. Rather than think in terms of your target
market as a generic demographic group, say women 25 – 54,
you write a persona about two or three protypical customers,
like Vera, Sarah and Nora. Personas are used by ad agencies
to help the creative people in developing the advertising,
and are now making a big impact in website design and
internet marketing. (It’s much easier to develop a website
that people like Vera, Sarah and Nora will like, than
designing for generic, faceless people.

Personas provide insight into your target groups. Of course,
you need to visualize what your personas look like
physically, but you also want to explore what makes them
tick. What do they like? Hate? What is the context of their
lives? What’s the back story? You’ll find that personas make
the branding job infinitely easier. Personas help to set the
right tone for your PR, advertising, web design and even
product development.

Here are some tips from my new book, U are a Brand, on how
to develop brand personas:

– Create a fictional bio for each persona. You want to
really know these people as a close friend so that your
company or product will fit the bill. Made sure you can
answer questions about the context of their lives - how they
live and what they do.

– Tap into your inner Freud: Tap into what the “needs” -
spoken and unspoken - of your personas. What do they want?
What are their motivations? What bugs them? What’s
important? Here is where your intuition can help fill in the
blanks

– Think outside-in: Begin brand development from the
persona’s perspective (Outside). What are their biases and
proclivities? Then, develop the Inside (the marketing
messages, product design, website design and content) that
will appeal to the persona’s mindset

– Think in terms of target markets: Be focused and specific:
a company or product that tries to satisfy everyone,
satisfies no one. Build your personas around specific,
though fictional, people. They should read not as statistics
but people you might meet on the street.

– Build a strong visual identity: When you develop your
personas, use pictures and other visual references so that
you and your marketing people can clearly visualize each
persona. If you can dream about them, then you’ve really
done your job.

– Trigger the right connections: Find the trigger words and
hot buttons that appeal to your brand’s personas and use
them in your marketing.

– Tap into soft power. Soft power is about attracting people
through branding and other soft ideas: product name, style,
and design. If you really understand your personas, this
will be easy.


Catherine Kaputa is a brand strategist, speaker and author
of U R a Brand, How Smart People Brand Themselves for
Business Success (www.urabrand.com). Entrepreneurs and marketing mavens can visit BrandEspresso, a
website dedicated to branding double shots for growing
companies (www.brandespresso.com). For personal branding
tips and advice, visit www.selfbrand.com.

Related Articles
  Strategic Branding Questions
  Personal Branding Tips for Beginners
  A Website or Blog is Worth a Thousand Brochures
  The Power of a Brand Name and how to make your own brand powerful
  Your Brand is More than a Logo or a Tagline

Article Tags:



Related Forum Posts
Re: Partner with Sony Pictures.Coca-Cola and Toyota - I've truly always been amazed by small businesses who have big name company's listed on their websites with whom they have done work for or partnered in the Past. Has anyone on the Forum has such a partnership with large organizations or Brand name companies? Would you mind sharing how you were able to set up the partnership without giving away names of people you work with?
Top 19 Copywriting books - 1. Ogilvy on Advertising. David Ogilvy. Wiley. 2. Positioning: The Battle for your Mind. Al Ries and Jack Trout. Warner. 3. The New Positioning. Jack Trout. McGraw-Hill. 4. Tested Advertising Methods. John Caples. Prentice-Hall. 5. How to Make your Advertising Make Money. John Caples. Prentice-Hall. 6. Guerrilla Advertising. Jay Conrad Levinson. Houghton Mifflin. 7. Direct Mail Copy that Sells. Herschell Gordon Lewis. Prentice-Hall. 8. Sales Letters that Sizzle. Herschell Gordon Lewis. NTC Business Books. 9. Herschell Gordon Lewis on the Art of Writing Copy. Herschell Gordon Lewis. Prentice-Hall. 10. Romancing the Brand. David Martin. American Management Association. 11. The Art of Writing Advertising: Conversations with William Bernbach, Leo Burnett, George Gribbin, David Ogilvy, Rosser Reeves. NTC Business Books. 12. Confessions of an Advertising Man. David Ogilvy. NTC Business Books. 13. My Life in Advertising. Claude Hopkins. NTC Business Books. 14. Scientific Advertising. Claude Hopkins. NTC Business Books. 15. How to Become an Advertising Man. James Webb Young. NTC Business Books. 16. The Lasker Story as He Told It. NTC Business Books. 17. Advertising Concept and Copy. George Felton. Prentice Hall. 18. The Copy WorkShop Workbook. Bruce Bendinger. The Copy Workshop. 19. Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This: A Guide to Creating Great Ads. Luke Sullivan. Wiley. This should keep you busy for at least a year. Enjoy!
Re: what position to request? - Hi Michael, Great suggestion from David, or you could try something around a design consultancy, How about Website Design Consultant, Design and Development Manager, Website Support and Development Manager or maybe Internet Business Development Consultant. Ultimately whatever you are comfortable with and good luck for the future, Mal.
Business Tips - How about: Tips for managers to handle employees more effectively? Tips on how to deal with difficult customers? Tips on how to deal more effectively with suppliers? The only three I have in mind right now, but will try to come up with something else. Chris
Brand Babble - I recently read another great book called "Brand Babble" The book debunks a bunch of branding 'myths' that have seem to get passed around as conventional branding wisdom. The authors are Don E Schultz & Heidi F Schultz. ISBN 0-538-72714-4


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Tweet

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

10 Steps to a Great Support Team

Selling On Ebay The Good The Bad And The Ugly

Leader's Success Secret: Celebration

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.