Defining and personifying your brand

November 9, 2019

Would you choose the toothpaste that just cleans your teeth or the toothpaste that is genuinely interested in your love life and promises to make your mouth fresher, cleaner and odour free? Probably the latter.

Your underlying reason for choosing this brand over the others is that its branding message was personal, reliable and relatable. This may be the era of smart phones and social networking, but people are still attracted to humane and human emotion no matter how developed the technology is.

Have you ever wondered, why among a couple of businesses which uses branding and that makes equally good products, just one manages to cut through the clutter and shine amongst its consumers? An average man who uses internet actively is bombarded with at least 500 branding messages from different businesses.

Hence it is most important to know what makes your brand to overcome this competition and outshine. This is where defining and personifying your brand plays a crucial role.

Defining and personifying

For many, still branding only means usage of a proper logo and usage of same colours throughout their promotional activities. But branding is so much more than that. It is about giving a character to your brand. It is about introducing your brand as a person whom your customers can relate to.

There are about 15 traits a brand can follow and about 5 traits among them can be used to segregate almost all the brands The five main traits include, sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication and ruggedness. Almost every brand can be described as one of these five personalities (or the opposite of such).

Being able to identify your brand with one of these personal traits can help your brand become vocal and more reliable for the target audience. That is why it is important to take your product to them using a medium that your consumers can relate to. You need to breathe life into your brand by giving it character, emotion and style.

How do you implement it?

There are three important things when it comes to branding, understanding the quality of your brand, understanding how the target audience are perceiving it and the third is to understanding competitors branding and to know how to stay away from it.

Once you have defined your brand with a clear and crisp brand positioning, the next step is to revamp your brand. Right from choosing colours to the content on your promotional materials, follow the brand definition you have derived. You need to sound like the individual you have imagined your brand to be. You need to communicate in such a way people can identify you with the kind of language you use.

Vodafone in India is a quirky brand with funny promotional campaigns whereas Airtel India is much more casual, colloquial and trendy in their language. You can clearly differentiate these brands through their branding and also relate to what these brands stand for.

There is another stellar example of identifying brand personality. Under Armour is a sports clothing company who decided to revolutionize the sport clothing market that is aced by Nike and Adidas. The founder of Under Armour was a sportsperson himself and wanted fellow athletes to use his products and talk about it.

This was the strategy Nike’s founder did 30 years ago. He distributed free sneaker to runner outside of a stadium. Phil Knight, Founder of Under Armour did just that and built a character to the company which portrayed not being afraid to compete with giants. People actually liked that and the brand went on to become a huge success.

That is the result you want to see when you brand your product or service. You should know how to promote, communicate and sell as the personality you have imagined your brand to be. There are many qualities you can choose for your brand.

You can make it look funny, professional or even as a rebel like Harley Davidson does. Just choose your character and work around it to be sure you are doing the right as a brand.