Selecting Brand Adjectives for Business

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Using Brand Adjectives to Shape Brand Perception

Adjectives describe the qualities of a person, place, or object. Therefore, it’s important to find the right adjectives to describe the qualities of your business. Once you pick the words you want, you’ll need to build out a spectrum of how strongly you want these adjectives to shine through in your brand so that you can start shaping the visual components of your brand later on.

Introduction to Selecting Effective Brand Adjectives for Business

If you're considering starting or redefining your business's brand, then the absolute first place to start is with your brand adjectives. 

In the last video in our course, we talked about how you should be thinking about your brand adjectives, and in this video, we're going to be selecting brand adjectives for the imaginary barbershop that we've been building in the course. 

Hey everybody, Will Scheren here from Small Business Startup Guide by TRUiC. This video is part of a larger course dedicated to helping small business owners cut through the noise and get to the essentials of starting and operating their business. If that sounds like it would be really useful to you, be sure to like and subscribe. 

So let's start by looking at a large list of adjectives and selecting a few that we could build our barbershop brand around. After looking at this list, the adjectives I selected were “modern,” “familiar,” “warm,” “polished,” and “formal.” I selected “modern” and “polished” because I wanted the brand to feel high-end to match the price point. But I also selected “warm” and “familiar” to keep the classic fraternal aspects of a barbershop. 

Next, we'll Google antonyms of each of the words that I selected and pick the ones that I think best oppose the adjectives that describe how we want the brand to feel. You can see here that I selected “old-fashioned,” “uncommon,” “cold,” “careless,” and “carefree.”

Next, we’ll assign a weight to scale how modern, familiar, or warm and polished we'd like the brand to feel. You can see here that we've given a “modern” score of plus two, “familiar” score of plus two, “warm” score of plus three, “polished” score of plus two, and “formal” score of plus one. These scores are relatively arbitrary and don't have any real quantitative meaning, but they'll be useful in helping you communicate how you want your customers to feel about your brand when working with people who don't yet have an understanding of it. 

We've saved a template for you to be able to create your own brand personality spectrum, and you can get that using the link that we've provided below this video. If you use this document after filling it out, you can select the second sheet and save that as a PDF to share your brand personality spectrum with people outside of your organization as well. 

In the next several videos, we'll be using these adjectives as we learn about standardizing the languages surrounding our brand and each of our products. 

This video is part of a step-by-step course that provides business owners all the essential information to start and operate their business. We provided a link for you to get access to all of the free and discounted business tools that we mentioned in the course below this video. 

Be sure to like and subscribe to get more of this content. We'll see you in the next video. And if you have any questions, let us know.