There are many strategies for brands to connect with their audience. One of the more important keystones is brand personality — a collection of characteristics expressed through visual and written language in your marketing.

Most of these come from a collective unconscious understanding of visual cues (we call it semantics, but we’ll talk about that another day) — with the goal of making your brand more human and relatable.

Two things that often get confused is brand personality and brand values. While they do compliment one another, they are not the same. Values are what your business stands for, like honesty, quality and authenticity. Personality is how these values are communicated - its your tone of voice, how you look and feel to become believable and relatable.

Brand Values provide the substance of “WHAT” you need say, and Brand Personality is “HOW” we say it. It’s what makes your brand more than a corporate entity, to establish that intangible human connection and loyalty.

For many, founder based businesses may model the brand personality after themselves, because the brand is primarily presented to the world via the founder. But in order to scale, more work needs to be done to create a standalone persona.

In order to decide how you want your brand to show up in the world, we often find it helpful to imagine the brand as a person. How would they sound? How would they dress? Are they bubbly and outgoing, or serious and regal? All this trickles down to the imagery, design style, typography and copywriting of your brand identity.

Another factor we can’t stress enough is the element of consistency. If how you sound on the phone to your customer is different to how you sound in social media — that dissonance could negatively affect your customer journey. Knowing how you need to present yourselves will help achieve build trust at all touchpoints.

And lastly, if there is only one thing you need to take away from this blog post, it’s this: you need to know your ideal customer. Too many brands don’t get to reach their potential because they’re trying to appeal to everyone. Brand building is the same with relationship building — you can’t please everyone. When we try to do this, the brand can come off as bland, boring even — because that would sand down all the edges and corners that makes the brand unique.

Know your customer. Know your story. Then you can create resonance and connect! If you’re curious to know more on how to build the perfect brand persona, send us a bat signal. We’re nuts for the stuff.