Defining Your Brand Identity and Personality

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Brand Personality Matters

Before you get into the aesthetics of your brand, you’ll first need to figure out what your brand is. Finding the right words to describe your business is the best way to start.

Your brand’s personality should create a feeling that customers connect with and remember. By looking for feelings that you want your business to embody, as well as key aspects that set yourself apart from the rest of the market, you can give your brand a solid foundation on which to build upon later.

Defining Your Brand Identity and Personality – Transcript

So you're the owner of your own business — you would think that you would be able to decide how people should perceive your brand, right? Well, not exactly. Let's take a look at the best way to define your brand's brand identity and brand personality. 

Hey everybody, Will Scheren here from the 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. 

After doing some research on your business’s products, services, and customers, it's time to start defining your brand personality. 

Every brand identity needs a well-defined brand personality, and the adjectives used to describe that personality should be felt in every component of your brand — from the voice, color palette, fonts, logo, photography, videography, and any other component that builds an experience for your customers or your audience. 

A clear brand personality will be what your customers relate with, connect to, and remember you for. This can play a role in increasing your brand awareness, so it's really important that a business selects brand adjectives before it starts making any other branding decisions. But how should a business owner go about picking adjectives to describe their brand? 

Start by selecting a few adjectives that describe how you want your customer to feel when having positive interactions with your product or service. And be sure to focus on the things that set your business apart from its competitors. 

If your company is already up and running, the best way to get a read on your current brand identity is to talk to a few of your most enthusiastic customers. Get those top customers to tell you what they love about your business, have them take a look at a list of brand personality traits like the one here, and ask them to pick out the adjectives that describe the business best to them. 

If you're not at the stage where you have customers yet, you can get your colleagues to do the same experience and supplement it with a bit of background research. Research competitive brands within your niche, identify the key qualities that set your brand apart from your competitors, and use these key qualities to identify your brand's vision, which should speak to your brand's target audience. 

After selecting a few adjectives, a good next step is to place the adjectives that you selected across from their antonyms on a brand personality spectrum — just like this one. To find good antonyms, simply Google the antonyms of the words that you selected, then decide where you would like your brand to fit within each adjective set. This will help you describe the intensity to which each of the adjectives you selected should be applied to your brand.

At the end of this process, you should have at least three to five adjectives that describe your brand to a T, and passing along this brand personality spectrum to anyone who touches your brand can be a useful way for you to communicate how you want your customers to feel when interacting with your brand, products, or services. 

These adjectives will also be instrumental in describing how anyone who's associated with the business, from the CEO to the customers, talks about your business's brand and products. They're also critical for making decisions that will make a cohesive brand package. 

If, after watching this video, you're still having trouble confidently selecting brand adjectives for your brand, be sure to check out the next video in this course. 

This video is part of a step-by-step course that provides business owners all of 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.