The Importance of Brand Personality in B2B business – How to Create one

The Importance of Brand Personality in B2B business – How to Create one

The Importance of Brand Personality in B2B business – How to Create one

A brand personality puts a human face on your brand, making it unique in a competitive market. Brand personality signals whether your brand is adventurous or safe, fun or serious, trustworthy or suspectful which is just as important for B2B brands as it is for consumer-facing brands.Customers are looking for a brand that speaks to them in a way that’s relatable.

What is Brand Personality?

Your brand personality is how you would describe your brand if it were a person.Brand personality is the collection of emotional, intellectual, and behavioral patterns unique to a brand but consistent over time. Brands have traits that grow from the way they think and feel about the world. The authenticity and consistency of these traits are what separate a stronger brand from a weaker one.

Brand personality drives decisions regarding brand design and brand messaging. Just as, Red Bull’s personality is expressed as edgy and energetic, caffeinated and invigorating, by everything from its aspirational messaging to its charging bull logo to the sports and events it sponsors.

Why Does Brand Personality Matter?

Brand personality is a vital component of brand positioning and differentiation. An effective brand personality gives depth and nuance to the brand, and makes it relatable to its target audience. It plays a huge role in driving customer acquisition, building brand loyalty, and fostering brand equity. A well defined and effectively implemented strategy will drive the following factors:

  1. Competitive Differentiation
  2. Brand Awareness
  3. Brand Loyalty

How do you create a brand personality?

All meaningful brands stem from a brand platform that strategically defines what the brand personality should be. Use your core brand idea as a guide to explore and discover what brand personality will best express that idea and will be authentic to who you are as a company.There are different ways, all complementary, to create a brand’s personality – which also can offer fantastic team building opportunities by combining creativity, experience and thoughtfulness with serious fun.

Classic Method
Here the brand personality would be simply the answer to the question like “Who is your company?” ,“What resolutions has your company made to improve itself in the upcoming years?” This simple and easy exercise quickly identifies stretches in business, marketing, communications, culture and R&D that your company is looking at, and that need to be addressed.

Metaphors And Similes
Statements using metaphors and similes can be both qualitative and quantitative.

My company reminds me of _______.
Our company is like __
_____.

If only our company were more/less _______.

Responses typically indicate gaps, positive and negative, in service performance, product differences, and competitive differentiation, thus providing essential insights into a company’s direction in the future.

Consumer Psychographic Exercise
Another variation of this exercise: Who is your company as a consumer psychographic type? Is your company an early adopter – revolutionary or evolutionary, or a middle adopter – an aspirer, succeeder, or mainstreamer? What goals and values drive your company?

Imagery Exercise
Along to the exercises above is the classic imagery collage. From a set of four or five magazines highly creative and imagery(e.g. lifestyle, automotive, travel), ask colleagues to create a collage of the images that best represent your company at present, and that will best represent the company in future

If you repeat the exercise, always use the same set of magazines and don’t be surprised if out of different images, the same ones reappear across collages. This is a good sign, you’re on to something.

Examples of Brand Personalities:

1. DOVE: 
Dove’s brand personality is innocent, and pure. Its encouraging brand voice speaks to customers about beauty in a way that’s more than just skin deep.Dove is a great example of honesty and positivity in its campaigns, flaunting self-confidence and beauty in all shapes and sizes.

2. IBM:
IBM with a brand personality centered on technical expertise and education. IBM leverages its years of experience as an industry leader to offer solutions backed by useful, intelligent content that addresses the specific needs of its many audiences.

3. APPLE:
Apple’s brand personality is about passion; hopes and dreams; innovation and imagination; it’s about giving power to the people through premium technology. It is also about decluttering people’s lives.

4. COCA COLA:
This soft-drink brand is the perfect combination of sincerity and excitement, funneling the cheerful joy through its social media campaigns and advertisements, such as the “Share a Coke” campaign.

Conclusion:

Brand quirks are what make your brand relatable, and differentiate from the competition— How it looks, sounds, and acts as an agent in the world should be purposefully aligned with your brand positioning – ideally on a deep and meaningful level.

Understanding the psychology of brand personality will help you craft an authentic, magnetic, well defined, and, above all, consistent brand personality that keeps customers coming back, again and again.