Brand Personality can provide the key to an effective marketing strategy. It is often thought of as a fuzzy ‘tone and manner’ concept that only the creative and content teams need to work with. What many marketers miss is how powerful and useful a tool it is to plan all marketing actions.
Often the lack of appreciation for the tool is expressed as customers or employees’ inability to deal with such an abstract and ‘creative’ concept. Because they believe most of us are not creative!
“Our people are not very educated or articulate. They will not be able to express such abstract ideas.”
“This type of thinking requires some sophistication. You can try, but you are not going to get much from this.”
Brand leaders and managers often have this to say about the process of personification that is central to our process of developing brand insights and strategy.
“We will try and see” is our quiet and confident response every time. For we may be unsure about other things, but never about the human mind’s ability to personify. Personification works because we, humans, naturally, project human characteristics onto inanimate objects. Have you seen a child at play or read a beautiful piece of poetry? It would seem evident that creative minds express themselves naturally with personification.
A verse from the poem ‘Shoe Talk ’by Shel Silverstein is quite telling in this context
“There’s no one to talk with-
I’ll talk with my shoe.
He does have a tongue
And an inner soul, too.”
The question of Brand Personality
During the course of our conversations with customers, experts, and leaders we ask a simple question – “What kind of a human being or metaphor comes to your mind when I say Brand X?”. We then probe further to understand what about the brand or the customer is leading to this personification of the Brand. Answers to these questions have led us to breakthrough insights on what is working or not working with a brand.
For instance, a partner personified an education brand as ‘Sage on the stage’ and when we probed further, they spoke of its noble intentions, deep knowledge and wisdom but also its unwillingness to adapt or its lack of collaboration.
During another project, a customer personified a cement brand as a corrupt politician (the other expression was an MBA manager only doing marketing!) who is fooling people with false promises. The key source of this imagery were the significantly higher prices (than the brand the customer ultimately bought) that the customer viewed as unjustified in a category where product differentiation was not perceivable.
What Brand Personality reveals
When we share insights from personification, our client team members have been pleasantly surprised, sometimes stunned, by the richness and sophistication of actual responses from the field. For these insights go beyond linear, logical strengths and challenges. They capture the essence of a brand in a way that is not done otherwise.
Personification integrates information of many different aspects effectively as it allows people to express their feelings without any awkwardness associated with them. Sometimes they do not know why they feel something. Or they may not know how to express their feelings about a brand. Imagining the brand as something else helps them express what they feel in a simple and intuitive manner.
For the listener too, it is easy to understand the feelings the speaker is actually trying to convey. Brand personality captures the whole essence of a brand, which is often more than just studying different aspects of the brand individually. In a way, understanding brands through their personalities is a way of bringing systems thinking to the world of brands and business. Brands are much more than a list of attributes and people are much more than a list of attitudes and behaviours. Brands and people have relationships and this is what a Brand Personality can help understand and thereby nurture.
Brand personalities are shaped by people’s own knowledge of, experiences with, and feelings about the brand. They are influenced by whatever they hear, see and experience. As different people may have varying experiences with a brand, the brand personification may differ accordingly. What we need to do is to look for patterns in personification by different groups of people and arrive at a synthesis of brand personality values.
How Brand Personality helps in action
What makes the brand personality tool very useful is how people are able to explain why they are imagining the personality of a brand in a certain way. They may talk about their own experiences of the brand’s products and services, the legacy of the company, the communication by the brand, its prices, what its competitors are doing and more.
This helps us provide insights into the strengths and challenges of different elements of a brand. Understanding this helps the team arrive at actionable insights about what needs to be reinforced or improved in a brand. It also alerts the team to issues when there is significant inconsistency in brand personalities (for the same brand) articulated by customers, employees, partners.
The Brand team can then work together to arrive at a desired Brand Personality that reinforces the current one or reframes it to make it positive and aligned with business goals and market context. A brand personality, thus defined, can provide high differentiation. As it is a sum total of overall company culture, history, products & services, pricing, communication; a brand’s personality is impossible to be appropriated by competitors.