Finding a Brand Personality

#brands need personality; the same goes for a couple of our football buddies, but we're not in that business.

We are in the business of helping brands develop a #brandpersonality that creates a positive emotional bond with the public.

A deep emotional connection with the public results in better recognition, loyalty and sales figures and acts as a compass for your marketing campaigns.

The concept of a brand personality has lived in the advertising space for decades, but it wasn't fully conceptualized and articulated until 1995 with the release of David Aaker's Building Strong Brands book introduced his "Vision model," now commonly known as the "#AakerModel."

We won't rehash the entire book here, copyright laws, yadda, yadda, but we'll explore his ideas around a brand personality.

In essence, a brand's personality, like yours or ours, is the human traits we display to the world through our appearance, expressions, and actions.

Defining and demonstrating these traits through your brand offers the public a chance to get to know you and become your friend. Their association with your brand allows them to display their personality as it resonates with your products.

The public may not overtly admit to choosing a product precisely because of their emotional connection to the brand. Still, every year, people across the planet dutifully line up at their local Apple store, ready to buy the latest iPhone on the first day.

Conversely, and we're sure there are many of you reading this who scoff at the idea, thinking, my Samsung Electronics phone had that "new" iPhone feature over a year ago.

Whether we admit it or not, both groups emotionally resonate with Apple's "sophistication" or Samsung's "competence".

Aaker's model asks brands to choose from one of five dominant personalities; you know the two are sophistication and competence, and the others are sincerity, excitement, and ruggedness.

Sincerity encompasses traits such as being down-to-earth, honest, wholesome, and cheerful. Sincerity brands are the ones you can take home to your parents. Amazon or the Hallmark Media channel are good examples.

Excitement-dominant brands demonstrate youthfulness. They're carefree, unique, and daring. These brands you date in college and don't bring home for Thanksgiving.GoPro and Nike display excitement as their primary personality trait.

Competence brands show their personality through reliability, intelligence, and success. If you need the answers to your college exams, these are the brands you want to ask for help. As mentioned above, Samsung displays competence as its primary trait.

Ruggedness is probably the easiest to identify as their strength, toughness and outdoorsy personality are hard to miss. When we finish this article, let's fill aYeti cooler with some Sleeman Breweries Ltd. Cream Ale and ride off on our Harley-Davidson Motor Company motorcycle.

Sophistication, my mother would always say, "You can't buy class," but sophisticated brands like Louis Vuitton, CHANEL and Apple beg to differ. Their traits include charm, glamour and, yes, class.

If you think, "My Apple products are very competent" or "My Samsung Galaxy flip and fold exciting," and you're wondering why those brands are under 'competent' and 'sophistication,' that's a good question.

Just as we can equally enjoy delicately prepared sea bream sashimi before attending the theatre on a Friday night and yelling, "D-FENCE" at the TV with a fist full of wings on Sunday afternoon, good brands have a depth to their personalities.

Brands will have a dominant personality and a secondary one that's not immediate but present and relatable. This depth allows them to enlarge their emotional appeal to a broader audience.

When determining your brand's personality, here are a few questions to ask yourself to help determine your dominant and secondary.

If your brand were a person, who would they be?

What would your brand do on the weekends?

What is your brand's favourite meal or drink?

How do you want people to feel when they think of your brand?

Is your brand more comfortable in sweats, suits, khakis, and polo shirts?

These questions are just a start, but they give you an idea of some of the thinking that needs to go into finding or creating your brand's personality.

At Merchant North, we have branding specialists who will work with you to build a personality that resonates with the public to create a strong emotional attachment to your brand.

Make the Call.

develop a personality that resonates with the public and creates