What is brand personality?
When I worked in PR, people used to say reputation was what people say about you when you’re not in the room. Brand personality is very similar: a description of how people envisage a brand beyond physical attributes.
Take Red Bull for example: in practical terms, a red liquid in a silvery can. Yet the brand name ‘Red Bull’ conjures up images far beyond the drink or can shape, and certainly unconnected to the taste or ingredients. Ditto Apple, Disney, and many other well-known brands. Each has a distinct personality, comprising at least five ‘traits’.
Personality traits were originally used to describe a person’s long-term characteristics. Similarly, traits can describe the characteristics of a brand. In a very widely-read paper in 1997 (nearly 17,000 citations), Jennifer Aaker established five traits for describing brands. Taking more than 300 well-established words describing human characteristics, participants rated their applicability to brands. In the same paper, a further study established which of these characteristics describe similar aspects of brand personality i.e. ‘traits’.
The result is five ‘factors’, or themes, against which brands can be assessed: sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, and ruggedness. Some brands are particularly associated with just one of these factors, but most combine various factors to some degree. There are tests to assess this among customers, involving customers scoring a range of words that can then be related to each factor.
So if you own or manage a brand, consider which of these, or indeed which combination of these factors best describes your brand. Understanding this through the customer’s eyes, and perhaps considering your desired brand personality, ought to then guide you to specific content ideas and marketing activity to support this.
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
