There are many elements that make up a brand, from your brand name, slogan or tagline, and unique value proposition to visual identities such as your logo, font, color palette, and product packaging. Advertising themes or scripts, distinct smells, music, or sounds are also brand elements.

While these elements all play a role in your brand identity, only some qualify as true brand assets.

Your brand assets include your products and services, your business model/strategy and technology, your people, your visual identity, and even your tone of voice.

Since your brand incorporates all these assets, the fundamental goal of building a rock-solid brand is that everything around it has to be consistent, coherent, and clear. It means clarifying your vision (Purpose), defining your target customers (Positioning), and reaching them with the right messages and the right channels (Personality).

1. Purpose

Your brand purpose should answer the questions of why your brand exists with respect to the positive difference it aims to make in people’s lives.

Your brand purpose should be at the center of everything your brand does. It should inform how your brand thinks and make decisions. It should be the reason for every action your brand takes. And it should seek to further that purpose with every experience.

To keep it simple, your brand purpose is what truly defines your brand; what influences everything you do, and what lets you develop over time. Your customers can be attached to your products, but can only be truly connected to your purpose over time. Think about how attached people were to their blackberry phones, and think how deeply connected they are to Apple.

For example, Apple’s purpose is simply “To empower creative exploration and self-expression.” According to a recent Forbes article, “Apple is the world’s most valuable brand for the ninth straight year, worth $205.5 billion by Forbes count and 67% more than second-ranked google. A 2015 study by Harvard Business Review and Ernest and Young showed that companies with a strong sense of purpose are able to transform and innovate better, as well as improve employee satisfaction.

One of the best things about your brand’s purpose is that it stays with you over time.

If your brand purpose comes from your company’s heart, it doesn’t matter if you have to pivot your business at some point (chances are you will), your brand identity will remain intact.

Ultimately, brand purpose is your brand’s philosophical heartbeat. It’s not an ad campaign, a tagline, or a marketing tactic. A brand’s purpose only means something if every aspect of the brand and business supports and upholds the purpose.

Define Your Brand Purpose

To define your purpose, you need to ask “Why?” This is the most powerful question you can ask when defining the purpose of your company:

• Why do we care?
• Why do we do what we do?
• Why do we want to build this company?
• Why should Peoplecare?
• Why does it make sense?

2. Positioning

Once you define your purpose, it’s time to position your company and your products.

Why should I choose you? What makes you so special? Why should I care about you? Do you say you’re the best option on the block? Prove it to me.” These are the thoughts of your customer.

Brand positioning- this is the territory you occupy in your customers’ mind relative to your competitors and whether those customers believe you’re the best option to meet their needs. How can your company address your prospective customers’ desired outcomes in a way that no one else can?

The positioning statement is not found on a package, website, or store shelf. Rather, it’s an internal exercise that drives all the key decisions in an organization. It defines what you say, where you say it, how you say it, and who you say it to. It guides what you produce and how you market and sell it. Effective brand positioning relies on competitive research and analysis, consumer insights, and an honest evaluation of where your business stands and fits in the marketplace.

“Our product is for absolutely everyone” might sound ambitious, but is that really true? Words don’t impress our investors, facts and numbers do. So unless you have unlimited resources – actually, even if you do – the best way to take your product or service to market is by differentiating your company and focusing on a particular target audience.

The momenta brand positioning strategy is agreed, a company seeks to make sure that through consistent brand communications, inside and out, it reinforces the kind of image it wants people to have. So, it can build the right position in people’s minds.

You have to be cautious however, it’s not about being different for the sake of it. It’s about being different with the right purpose. Your positioning should be aligned with your purpose and a well-thought strategy. Try focusing on those customers who are suffering the most about the need you are trying to solve. Focus on those early adopters who will become your champions.

In the brand positioning process, it’s important to understand that your target market is regularly-changing. You need to continue to evaluate the market and your target customers — those that are most important to the future of your brand. With this understanding, continue to re-visit your positioning and tighten the focus.

To have a good start, ask yourself these questions:

• What do we do?
• What are the benefits?
• What don’t we do?
• What makes us special?

3. Personality

Once you define your positioning, it’s time to build your personality.

What do we mean by personality? The simpler definition of the word personality is, “The combination of characteristics or qualities that form an individual’s distinctive character.”

But wait, isn’t that positioning? Yes, it is similar, but brand personality encompasses the attitude around this positioning, and the perception it creates to your audience.

We could also ask you the same question in another way;

What is your brand personality? Hint: It’s not your personality. It’s not your team’s vibe. It’s not the look and feel of your product. It might not even be what you had in mind when starting your company.

It’s time to define what your brand’s personality actually is, and I am glad to share ‘the secret sauce’ with you.

A brand’s personality is derived from keywords that best describe your brand’s character as if your brand was a person. You think about how your brand wants to be perceived by your target audience – how it wants to make them feel. Who is your brand as a person? Is (s)he helpful, clever, feisty, glamorous?

“Your brand personality plays a crucial role in developing and maintaining strong brands.”

Brands stand out not only by how they position themselves in the marketplace but also by how well they connect with customers.

Brand personality is what makes your business human in the eyes of your potential customers. It’s communicated through tone of voice, visuals, and even customer service policies. Anything you do to inform your audience what the experience is like to be your customer can benefit from conveying consistent personality traits.

Brand personality is how you communicate with the world. Every message you publish, every email you send, every slogan you use. Make sure that all those messages are aligned with your purpose and your positioning. Your customers should love your messages, and if you are being bold enough, those who are not your customers might hate them – and that’s okay!

According to psychologist Carl Jung, twelve universal characters exist in all our unconscious minds. Like so many other psychological theories, Jung’s ideas have been developed into the world of business and marketing, leading to the idea that there are twelve brand archetypes – that is, a brand’s personality can be one of twelve possible characters.

Each character comes with a set of distinctive traits which detail the brand’s personality.

Figure 1: The twelve Brand Archetypes and their descriptive personalities.

If your brand doesn’t have a defined personality, people will have a much harder time reaching the conclusion that you’re the one for them.

Consider this:

People purchase things from brands they like and relate to–it’s really just that simple. If people don’t have a clear sense of you, they’re just gonna keep on scrolling.

Inconsistent, generic brand messages with no real strategy or intention behind them aren’t going to get you anywhere–there’s just too much noise competing for your dream clients’ attention.

To put it plainly, when you define your brand personality, you give people a reason to choose you.

Now that you understand it, go get some attitude now! And don’t forget that this attitude has to be consistent throughout your organization. It should be permeated through every person in it, injected into every product you make, and sealed in every single message you give to the world.

Do you want to start a project or build a sustainable brand? Get in touch.