My approach to Brand personality development borrows from a few different profiling techniques, dependent on the group I’m working with. If you’re looking to develop a personality that’s human, profiling is about the best ‘science’ there is to home in on distinctly human characteristics that one would normally see out there in the real world. It’s also a great way to bypass the rational thinking that people apply when they assign brand archetypes. You can apply the archetype that best fits afterwards, and avoid the pitfalls of your own bias. I use this profile as a foundation to then apply to one of Aaker’s five dimensions, and then an appropriate archetype, alongside a host of probing questions asked within an emotional context that places the thinkers alongside their customers.
Confused? Reasonably so. Some scenes are easier to set than others and I’d place brand personality development on the harder side until you’re actually doing it. I can recall countless burrowed frows, and with good reason. The quizzical looks usually come after they read the first profiling question and realise, it’s easy enough to answer except for the fact that they don’t know who’s meant to be answering it.
If we’re trying to answer these personality questions on behalf of a single human entity, which single entity is it meant to be? There seem to be some clear cut options; Yourself, (just as any artisan brand would), your team (even though they will change over time), a personality purely based on representing your target audience, or one that you believe your target audience would fall in love with. This is a key starting point and you need to get it right. Ask the right personality questions of the wrong person, and you still get the wrong answer.
To answer this then, it feels fruitful to reflect on what’s actually trying to be achieved here. What is the ultimate goal of brand personality development? I propose the following:
‘To generate sustainable brand equity by developing a set of distinctly human subconscious connections in the minds of a given community, with the intention of bypassing their conscious rational faculties.’
In short, to have them trust, or indeed ultimately ‘love’ your brand.
For me then at least, one thing becomes abundantly clear about the options offered above. Whatever you do, it’s got to be real. You can’t ‘fake it to make it’. Lack of authenticity is something that human beings are hardwired to notice, and feel a degree of discomfort around. That surely then leads away from answering these profiling questions on the behalf of an imaginary person you believe your target audience would want to associate with, or indeed, a direct reflection of the audience themselves. With too many opportunities to break the illusion, being illusory clearly isn’t sustainable. If this imaginary person isn’t someone you and your team can truly associate with, you’ll struggle to portray them every day.
"With too many opportunities to break the illusion, being illusory clearly isn’t sustainable."
Answering on behalf of you and your team has its own issues too though.
Firstly, your team are multiple different people, and secondly, and more importantly, in order to form a subconscious connection, your brand’s personality does need to resonate with the minds of your target audience. Are you confident that you and your team have this resonance within you as individuals?
So neither approach fits, and I think that’s because a major issue lies in the term ‘target audience’. It’s the causality that matters here.
Good brands attract. They have a draw. A pull. People see in brands something or someone they want to be associated with. That means, rather than target outwards, it’s better to attract inwards. Fortunately then, chances are, unless you’re creating a brand personality in the first stages of setting up a business, you’ve already authentically attracted people to your brand. You already have a loyal fan base; existing customers who have bought into what they believe you’re about, almost inevitably before you know yourself. What’s more, they continue to define who you are, and with any luck, others are starting to take notice. It’s these people that hold the key to defining your personality, and the bonus is, they bought into something that already exists; something authentic, something real. It just hasn’t been described by you or your team. Not yet at least.
So, as is often the case, it’s not a binary answer. It isn’t simply one of the options above, but rather, all of them and none of them at the same time. Great. How about I offer a straight answer to the question, and not be quite so ethereal?
The entity which needs to be answering these profiling questions is the one that your core customer base buys into, and the people most capable of putting their minds in the headspace of this entity are you and your team, provided you’ve truly taken the time to get to know your core customers; the people that bought into you from the beginning. The wonderful thing is, they’re there. They’re available, they want to talk and they’re already in love with what you do. You just have to listen.
The problem comes then, when you want to appeal to someone else, which is a whole other philosophical rabbit hole for another time.
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