The difference between a company and a brand? A company is simply a registered organisation that produces and sells goods and services. It is a legal unit under which all contacts are signed, people are hired, and transactions are made. A brand is what the consumers directly interact with while buying products and services from the company. A brand is built based on the associations consumers have with products and services offered by the company and the communication put out by the firm.
Think of the company as steel bars used to hold up the pillars of a building. When someone admires a building, they admire the architecture, the design, the colour of the walls, the windows, and the garden, while the steel walls stay hidden. The elements that are directly visible to any passer-by may be considered the brand in this analogy. A Dove soap is a Dove soap and not a Unilever soap even though all ingredients used to make the soap are purchased under Unilever. People recognise products by their brand and not their holding company.
What makes a Brand?
A brand is something the consumer knows and loves. The reputation is built over time. While many of the best-loved brands emerged organically, as people began to associate certain qualities with them, the others were deliberately and meticulously built over time. Building a brand or branding is the process of creating an identity around a product, service, or company. Here are a few attributes that define brands.
- Easily recognisable: Brands have their set of trademark elements that make them distinct and easily identifiable. They include name, logo, symbols, typeface, packaging, and jingles. Often, it is the brand identity built around a product that makes it stand out from other similar products. For example, Coke and Pepsi are similar products that are only set apart by their packaging and brand identities. Anyone can tell the two brands apart by their distinct red and blue packages and their iconic logos, while it is not too easy to actually tell their products apart.
- Memorable: Brands are what the consumers directly interact with; it is the brands that stick in people’s minds. Each brand element discussed in the last point acts as nodes or centres of information related to the brand. As soon as a customer sees or recognises one of these facets, it triggers a set of memories related to the brand. Sometimes brand names become so popular and well associated with a category of products or services that it becomes a synonym for all the products in the category. If you’re looking for a place to get a photocopy of your documents in India, you’re more likely to find one if you ask for a Xerox shop than if you ask for a photocopy shop. The word Xerox entered common parlance when the photocopy machines sold by the American company of the same name became popular in India. Since Xerox was the most used brand of photocopy machines in India, the name of the brand became synonymous with the product.
- Build relationships: Over time, consumers grow fond of brands, their products, services values, and the kind of communication they put out. These brands become what Saatchi and Saatchi’s founder Kevin Roberts referred to as Love Marks. The consumer becomes a supporter and an advocate for such brands. Apple users, for example, claim that Windows can never match up to the user experience they get from Mac OS. In turn, the users become Apple’s brand ambassadors.
Brand Personalities
The relationship a brand has with a customer is determined by how a customer sees the brand. The visual identity of a brand is built through symbols, iconic packaging, the touch and feel of the product, logos, and taglines. However, the most important aspect of a brand is its personality.
A brand has a set of human characteristics which either become ascribed to it over time or are associated with it through shrewd marketing. Brand personalities are determined by core beliefs of a brand. It may reflect the personality of the founder or is based on the target audience of the brand.
A fun activity to understand brand personalities is to visualise a brand you use as a person. How old would this person be? Would the person be a man, a woman, or nonbinary? How would this person speak to you? Would he, she or they be a friend, an office mate, or someone older that you could depend on and turn to for advice? Now, try to think if you know of a celebrity who embodies the personality of the brand you are thinking of. Is there an animal or a bird that reflects the personality of the brand?
The brand Coke is all about enjoying the small moments of happiness in your life. The brand is young, approachable, and friendly. The brand personality of coke is bubbly and energetic. While designing an ad for Coke, Ken Stewart realised that Coke’s personality was embodied best by his golden retriever. He proceeded to design Coke’s mascot, a polar bear, using his dog as a base for its personality.
The brand personality scale
Jenifer L Aaker designed the brand personality scale to categorise personalities into five dimensions: sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, and ruggedness.
- Sincerity: Small town, family-oriented brands, such as Pillsbury dough, often take on a sincere brand personality. These down-to-earth small brands are trusted by consumers in the category of household items for everyday use.
- Excitement: Brands such as Benetton which want to appeal to a younger target audience generally have a spirited, lively, and imaginative brand personality. They try to be unique, fun, and trendy.
- Competence: Tech companies, in particular, try to adopt a competent brand personality. Google, Intel, and Microsoft are usually associated with efficiency and trustworthiness.
- Sophistication: Premium brands try to come off as sophisticated, classy and glamorous. Brands such as Rolex, Gucci and Apple have an aspirational aspect about them. If you were to imagine Gucci as a person, he would be nothing short of glamorous. Rolex would be the classy corporate guy everyone aspires to be. The brand personalities have been carefully crafted to maintain these images.
- Ruggedness: The best example of a rugged brand personality is that of Malboro as characterized by the Malboro Man. Marlboro was originally considered a cigarette for women as it came with a filter before it was rebranded to appeal to a male target audience. The Marlboro man was used to reinforce the idea that cigarettes with filters were still manly.
Brand personality through content
The content you post online is a powerful way to talk to your audience. Any text on your website, blog, and social media speaks to your audience, and is a way to get across your brand’s voice. Today, the internet is our first source of information and point of contact between brands and potential consumers. A brand’s first impression is often made through the content it posts. Therefore, it is important that your posts reflect your brand’s personality. After all, you want your audience to connect with your brand, not just check out your products and services.
Content marketing is a strategy with great potential for brand building. However, it is a tool which is severely underutilized. After conducting a study across 170 global brands, Acrolinx concluded that “less than one-fifth had consistent, high-quality content — the kind that helps them create better customer experiences, which in turn builds trust, credibility, and a great reputation. Everyone else either had inconsistent content, low-quality content, or worst of all, both.”
Every piece of content you post online is an opportunity to build a relationship with your audience. Here are five tips that will help your content bring out the brand’s personality and connect you with your audience.
- Define your brand personality: The first step of writing content that is on brand is knowing your brand. If the brand is well-established, some research is required. Look at the advertisements, the articles on the brand, and their recent activities. Find out about the mission, goals and objectives of the brand. Make a list of the adjectives that could be used to define the brand. If you’re creating content for a new brand, building the brand personality is completely up to you. Think about the product or service that the brand offers. What kind of people would be interested in buying these offerings? Always create a personality that appeals to your target audience.
- Choice of topics: The more content you have, the higher views you get. People who are new to blogging often fall into the trap of creating content in too many areas to increase the number of posts on their sites. Content marketers must be more focused in their approach. They must remember that all content is on behalf of a brand and meant for a specific target audience. Therefore, you should choose a topic that is relevant to both your brand identity and your audience. If your brand is artsy, you may post blogs on creative DIY ideas. If your brand deals with fitness, you can create content focused around workout schedules and different diets. Grammarly’s brand persona is that of a guide who helps writers improve their craft. They have chosen to post content about writing ideas, grammar tips, trends, and inspiration which are relevant to their target audience and reflective of the brand persona.
- Tone: The tone of your article determines the voice of your brand. The definition of tone in literature is how a writer expresses their attitude through words. The tone can be authoritative, friendly, humorous, sincere, formal or informal. The tone of your article can be determined by the choice of words, phrasing, the use of exclamations, and so on. Once you have chosen a tone that fits your brand personality, make sure to create a tone guide for your content team.
Slack, the team communication software, has mastered the art of creating brand content. Slack’s content team is famous for their iconic chatty statuses which address you like a friend. The messages always directly address the user which further builds a relationship between the brand and the customer.
- Use of language: The use of language also affects how your consumer perceives your brand. If your brand personality is friendly and approachable, stay away from phrases that sound too formal; use commonly-used words instead. ‘Hey’ or ‘hi’ sounds less formal than ‘greetings’. ‘Sorry’ sounds less formal than ‘our sincere apologies’. On the other hand, if you are writing for a company like Siemens which has a formal brand image, it is best to stay away from colloquialisms and informal language.
- Structure: How you structure your article also has a part to play in bringing out your brand image. Content writers are generally advised to keep their paragraphs short. This makes the articles more readable. However, paragraphs that are too short may seem inappropriate on sites that publish scholarly articles. Grammarly uses 4-5 line paragraphs in their blogs, while some of Neil Patel’s blogs have 2-3 line articles. This makes Grammerly’s articles look more in depth while making Neil Patel’s articles look like quick reads even though they may both be the same size.
- Consistency: The content a consumer reads on your site, blog and social media is a part of the overall consumer experience. Patrons want their experience to be uniform. Inconsistent content makes it harder for them to understand the brand personality and subconsciously affects the level of trust they have with the company.
The single most important rule for content writing is consistency. Brands have to be consistent in language, tone, the kind of topics they create, and their point of view. The more consistent these are, the stronger the brand personality becomes. Furthermore, the brand must ensure that the brand personality portrayed through their web and social media content is consistent with the personality that is portrayed in every aspect of their marketing communication.
Final words
Brand personalities are important as they give brands, a human face. They make brands seem relatable and coax the consumer to feel closer to them. When the brand personality is embodied in its content, the audience feels a sense of familiarity with the brand. Therefore, in content marketing, words like ‘content’, ‘marketing’, ‘brand’ and ‘personality’ work in sync to create an all-encompassing brand experience.