Every brand has a personality. What’s yours?

Just like every person has a personality, every business does too. That may sound strange, but how you communicate and what “human traits” you exude can make the interaction with your business boring, fun, critical, trustworthy, or cold. Brand personality has to be defined and intentional. 

The Brand Personality Scale, first coined by Jennifer L. Aaker in 1997 is seen as one of the primary frameworks for measuring the human characteristics of a brand. These include:

Sincerity, Excitement, Competence, Sophistication, Ruggedness

So how does this play out? Let’s think about an actual business. In market studies, Chick-fil-a consistently ranks high in Sincerity, Excitement, and Competence. If you’ve had a recent interaction with Chick-fil-a, you can totally see this play out. Just think about almost any interaction with an employee and you immediately see all three. What about their advertising? All three. In-restaurant experience? All three.. 

Brand personality has to be defined and intentional.

You have to think about your target audience or ideal customer. For example, if Chick-fil-a had the personality trait of Ruggedness because the founder liked to hike, then that would drastically change the perception of the business, thus changing who is attracted to the business. 

With brand personality, people with those traits are more likely to be attracted to businesses with those same traits.

In order to truly know how to position yourself, you have to remember who your customers are.

Brand personality is defined and intentional. What’s yours? What do you want it to be?