By Tim Fuller, Managing Director, Discount Displays
Your brand’s personality should be at the heart of your business, with all activity and messaging naturally centring around it. Organisations can gain a competitive advantage if they keep their brand strategy consistent, while also becoming more personable and appealing to target consumers.
Businesses often make the fatal mistake of believing brand personality can be crafted and communicated without much thought. However, this leads to erratic messaging and campaigns, which may alienate consumers. Here, I look at how how you can nurture your brand personality to attract and maintain customers.
Personality on point
Brand personalities naturally fall into one of five dimensions. Although not limited to one per brand. Sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication and durability. Developing a strong brand personality essentially enables you to tap into the emotions of your target groups by showing desirable images, messages and promotions, which will unconsciously attract them to your company and its products.
I’d say a brand like Kellogg’s corn flakes falls under the sincerity category. Kellogg’s is highly consistent with its branding and has only changed messaging slightly in the last few decades. Its strategy demonstrates quality, consistency, transparency and most importantly plays on nostalgia, taking consumers back to their childhoods.
So how can you put this type of approach into practice for your own business? Say you want to appeal to outdoorsy types; like Kellogg’s, you need to structure your marketing material in a way that’s attractive to them.
These buyers will typically look for hard-wearing, practical products and services. Placing value on durability and value for money. Convey these characteristics through social media marketing and on websites or in publications they are most likely to read in their free time.
Find your voice
Conveying personality through brand voice is the next step in communicating your messages. Think carefully about how that persona speaks to consumers and how you might engage them.
The tone of voice should be an expression of company values. For example, Missguided is a young, fun clothes company, its voice has a relatable friendly tone, so when you browse online it almost feels like you’re shopping with a friend who is helping you choose outfits in store.
Make your voice and messages relatable so individuals can build an emotional connection providing your business with long-term invaluable consumer loyalty. Injecting brand personality into content messaging should increase engagement rate significantly.
Choose your channels
You’ve figured out your personality dimension and given your brand its own voice. Now how do you showcase this most effectively to your target audience to obtain those desired new customers?
A level of analysis is required to understand where your target market is and what makes them tick. Making the correct decisions about marketing channels puts your organisation in a beneficial position because you can target the right consumers and prevent wasteful spend from being on the wrong platforms.
For example, Waitrose might choose Facebook as its key channel to showcase its latest offerings. Generation X use Facebook far more than any other group – on average 6 hours and 58 minutes a week – so, sharing in-store promotions online could encourage this target group to visit stores.
Similarly, millennials also use social media far more than television or radio. However, their preferred platform is Instagram, with 40% of millennial women saying it’s the best way for brands to reach them.
Brand personality is what makes your organisation unique and keeps consumers coming back for more. By tuning into their wants and needs, you’ll be able to create a brand voice and personality, which delivers the best messages across the right platforms, increasing customer recognition and build loyalty.
