Bring Your Brand Persona to Life: 2 Exercises

Bringing Your Brand to Life: Defining Its Persona

Simply identifying your brand's core principles, ideal customer, and market positioning isn't sufficient. A crucial step involves determining how your brand manifests itself.

Does your brand project an image of vibrancy, enthusiasm, and a dynamic presence? Alternatively, does it convey stability, reliability, and a sense of confidence? Much like individuals, each brand possesses a distinct character.

The Importance of Brand Persona

Your brand’s persona is the element that truly resonates with potential customers, as well as stakeholders like investors, partners, and both current and future employees.

While core values define the fundamental beliefs guiding your brand’s actions, the persona dictates its actual behavior. It encompasses how your brand communicates, emotes, and presents itself.

Developing Your Brand's Persona

Establishing your brand’s persona necessitates careful introspection. This process can be surprisingly insightful, akin to a therapeutic exercise, and the effort invested is worthwhile.

Articulating the characteristics that shape your brand’s persona, alongside the key components of its voice, will create a foundational document.

A Blueprint for Consistency

This document serves as a blueprint for every writer, marketer, product developer, and designer involved with your brand.

The persona section within your brand book acts as a guide, ensuring consistent brand representation across your entire team. This consistency is paramount in fostering brand loyalty and, ultimately, building substantial brand equity.

Consider these elements when defining your brand persona:

• How would your brand respond to a crisis?
• If your brand were an animal, what would it be and why?
• What are your brand’s favorite things?

Developing Your Brand's Persona: A Comprehensive Guide

Prior to defining your brand’s personality and voice, a solid understanding of your company’s core values, your intended audience, and your brand’s positioning within the market is essential. With these foundational aspects established, it becomes the opportune moment to convene your brand development team for the persona exercises detailed below.

In the initial phases of a company’s growth, the brand persona frequently mirrors the characteristics of the founder or founding team. Consequently, active participation from the founding members in this process is highly recommended. Including individuals responsible for content creation – such as those managing social media – and those with direct customer interaction – like your customer support manager – can also prove beneficial. Distribute approximately 100 blank index cards and a black Sharpie to each team member, then proceed with the following exercise.

Step 1: Present each question outlined below, allowing a few minutes after each for participants to generate three to five corresponding attributes.

• Imagine your brand receiving a significant award; how would the presenter characterize your brand to the audience?
• If your brand were to create an online dating profile, what key attributes should be emphasized?
• Considering an individual you deeply admire, how would you desire them to perceive your brand?
• Envision meeting your brand personified at a social gathering – how would you describe this individual?

Step 2: Gather the completed index cards, ensuring each card contains only a single attribute. Categorize the cards into three equally sized groups: “Pile A” represents the attributes most crucial to your brand identity and desired perception; “Pile B” encompasses attributes that effectively reflect your brand; and “Pile C” includes attributes of lesser importance. Eliminate all cards within “Pile C” after creating these initial groupings.

Step 3: Repeat the categorization process with the remaining cards, again dividing them into three piles and discarding those in “Pile C”. Continue this iterative process until only five or fewer attributes remain in “Pile A.”

Having identified the core (five or fewer) attributes that define your brand, the subsequent step involves translating these into actionable behaviors. Detail how each attribute manifests in your brand’s actions and overall presence. What actions must consistently be taken, and which should be avoided, to maintain alignment with each attribute? Conduct this analysis for each attribute, then integrate the findings into comprehensive descriptions.

The following examples from Fuel Capital serve as illustrative references:

These attributes collectively form your brand’s personality, which then serves as the foundation for your brand’s voice. The next crucial question to address is: How does a brand embodying this unique combination of attributes communicate with the world? Initiate a brainstorming session to compile a list of adjectives that could describe your brand’s communication style – is it witty, professional, conversational, informal, proper, joyful, modern, technical, sarcastic, optimistic, intelligent, informative, or reassuring?

A formal approach isn’t necessary; encourage participants to freely offer adjectives that come to mind. Designate someone to record each suggested adjective on a separate index card. Once a substantial collection of cards has been generated, group them based on similar meanings (for example, “friendly,” “chatty,” and “casual” could be combined). This categorization process will highlight the most prominent themes. Select the three largest groupings; these represent the core elements of your brand voice.

With your brand voice distilled to three key elements, the next task is to demonstrate how to implement them effectively. How do these elements influence the construction of your brand’s language and tone? This practical addition to your brand book clarifies how sentences are formed within your brand voice.

Arielle Jackson (formerly of Google, Square, eero, Cover, and now First Round Capital) offers a valuable exercise for voice guidance:

Consider this example:

Voice element: Concise and straightforward

• We provide immediate value through education.
• We are honest and build trust.
• We avoid unnecessary verbosity.

Practical application:

• Maintain brevity in all copy, eliminating filler words and superfluous details.
• Prioritize clarity and ease of understanding over cleverness, ensuring content is easily scannable.

These guidelines empower all contributors to brand language and marketing materials to maintain consistency. Utilize this framework to further elaborate on each of your three voice elements.

Implementing Your Brand Persona Effectively

Incorporate your established personality traits and detailed descriptions, alongside your defined voice guidelines, directly into the persona section of your comprehensive brand book. Request that your design team develop visual identity guidelines, reflecting the core personality attributes, for inclusion as well.

These visual guidelines should encompass brand colors, typography, logo usage, and parameters for image selection.

A rapid method for activating your brand personality and voice is to conduct a thorough content audit across all existing platforms and materials.

This audit should cover your marketing website, all social media channels, product descriptions, and even recruitment advertisements.

Utilize your defined attributes and voice elements as a benchmark for evaluating all content: Does the existing copy align with the persona? Does it accurately represent the brand’s voice?

Revise any content that doesn't immediately meet these standards.

Ensure that individuals managing your social media presence and providing customer support have a complete understanding of the brand persona and voice.

These channels frequently represent the primary and most frequent interactions with both existing and potential customers, making consistent persona representation crucial.

Remember to update the text within your automated systems, including customer service response templates, automated email communications, and push notifications.

While all team members involved in product or marketing content creation should be capable of embodying the brand personality and voice, rapidly growing organizations may benefit from appointing a dedicated brand steward.

This individual, ideally possessing strong copywriting skills and the ability to collaborate effectively with both product and marketing teams, should serve as the final reviewer for all significant content.

Their role is to guarantee that all published materials consistently adhere to brand standards.