Brand Personality Guide: Definition, Importance, and Examples

Brand personality is the unique and consistent way a company relates to its audience. A compelling brand personality helps you share your story with a target audience. It’s humanized, inclusive, and unique—it uses psychology to describe a brand. What are brand personality examples?

Brand personality is birthed as a result of attributing human-like traits, emotions, and characteristics to a brand. This article discusses brand personality examples in details.

What Is Brand Personality?

Brand personality is the foundation of brand integrity and the brand’s ability to connect with consumers on an emotional level. A marketing campaign must establish a brand personality to become successful.

Personality refers to the human-like attitudes and traits that a brand exemplifies. This helps customers instantly connect with, understand, and empathize with the brand.

Brand personality is how a business speaks to its audience. From the visuals and sounds used in marketing to the tone of voice and written words employed in these communications.

A strong brand personality helps a company create a positive relationship with its intended market. It allows people to empathize with and associate themselves with the company values. When people describe a brand as unique, caring, trustworthy, intelligent, and straightforward, it’s called the brand’s personality.

Importance of Brand Personality

Personality is a brand’s distinguishing characteristic that shapes customers’ perceptions of the brand. A brand personality that is likable and driven by a unique vision can get the target audience to buy a product.

Here’s why brand personality matters:

1. Develops Brand Image

A brand’s personality is a quality that people innately understand and connect with. The emotions that people have in response to your brand is what leads to buying.

Brand identity and personality are interconnected tools that help you develop a brand image in the market. Brand personality strategizes how a brand would behave in the market, while brand identity visualizes the strategy, creating a brand image.

2. Builds Emotional Connection

People like brands they can relate to. Customers often prefer products they believe represent a company’s values and passion. Your brand personality makes customers more likely to want to learn more about your product or service.

The more emotional connection you create with your brand personality, the more brand interactions your company will have.

3. Makes Communication Easy

A brand personality makes communication with potential customers effective and easy. Customers will understand the message a brand is trying to convey when they can relate to the brand’s personality traits.

Characteristics of A Brand Personality

Brand personality must be unique to help the company develop a distinctive identity. Rather than remaining a rigid entity, it should grow and change with the product. To build a brand identity, you need to understand what your customers will connect with.

The following are characteristics of a brand identity.

• It evokes a feeling of familiarity, respect, and comfort that immediately attracts the target audience.
• Has precise positioning that defines its target market.
• Optimal for use in advertising and branding to create a memorable and long-lasting experience.
• It displays a high degree of reliability that ensures the target market will be interested in its contents.
• Repels the customers that the brand doesn’t want to attract.
• It is easily recognizable and memorable, which results in substantial brand equity.

The Psychology of Brand Personality

The psychology of brand personality is divided into five dimensions: excitement, sincerity, competence, ruggedness, and sophistication.

1. Sincerity

Kind,honest, wholesome, thoughtful, cheerful, down-to-earth, and warm. Brands with these qualities display trustworthiness and reliability, making their customers feel safe. Cadbury, Hallmark, and Amazon fall into this category.

2. Excitement

Spirited, care-free, youthful and daring. Brands like this create a lot of hype and always excite their audience. Mountain Dew, Nike, BuzzFeed, and Red Bull are such brands.

3. Competence

Influential, reliable, accomplished, intelligent, and successful. Brands with these qualities are Google, Volkswagen, Microsoft, and Intel.

4. Sophistication

Poise, luxury, high-class, timeless, and glamour. Sophistication combines luxury with superiority to let its customers show off a classy lifestyle. A popular luxury brand is Dolce & Gabbana.

5. Ruggedness

Tough, adventurous, outdoorsy, athletic, and rough. Brands with this brand personality personalize the outdoor lifestyle of their customers and make them feel connected to nature. Brands like Jeep, Harley-Davidson, Woodland, and Yeti have ruggedness as their personality.

Real-Life Brand Personality Examples

1. Woodland

Woodland is a specialist in making outdoor and trek footwear. The brand’s personality is ‘ruggedness, outdoorsy, and ready-for-adventure.’ The brand uses the color green, which represents nature, to further portray its outdoorsy personality.

2. Cadbury

Cadbury specializes in quality chocolate products. Their brand personality is ‘sincerity.’ The purple used as their brand color demonstrates luxury and provides their ideal customer with a sense of product quality. Their products focus on family, friendship, gifting, honor, generosity, and caregiving.

3. Mountain Dew

Mountain Dew is all about ‘Excitement.’ The brand focuses on athletes and youths and encourages them to drink Dew and dare do adventurous things. Their tagline, “Dew or die,” demonstrates their imaginative traits. 

4. Microsoft

Microsoft demonstrates all the traits of a ‘competent’ personality. Its numerous product lines, browsers, smartphones, Xbox Series, operating systems, etc., demonstrates intelligence and accomplishment. Its competent character is also a result of its acquisition strategy. Microsoft has acquired brands like Hotmail, Skype, Nokia and others.

5. Dolce & Gabbana

This brand is one of the world’s most famous luxury brands. They retain their sophisticated brand identity through effective communication, marketing strategies, and premium pricing. Their innovative design creates a strong connection with their Mediterranean spirit, reflecting the “timeless” trait of their brand personality. They also focus on making their ideal customer feel charming, elegant, high-class, and dynamic. 

Conclusion

Brand personality is the distinct personality a company endorses and communicates to customers. The common brand personality examples are sincerity, competence, ruggedness, excitement and sophistication.

A consistent and memorable brand personality conveys a corporate image and creates a positive image in consumers’ minds. It also creates a strong emotional connection that makes it easy for the company to create a lasting memory and a sense of trust. Customers are more likely to patronize a brand if its personality is similar to theirs.