Stephen Houraghan here of BrandMasterAcademy.com and in this video you're
going to learn what brand personality is why it's so effective and the most
effective tool that you can use to develop a believable and relatable brand
personality for your brand.
now when it comes to building a brand one of the very first items on the agenda for the brand manager
is to find a way to connect the brand with the audience and there's many different elements that you
can use within the brand strategy to do that but top of the list is your brand
personality so what is brand personality well it's a collection of
characteristics that our brand uses in the marketplace to display our messages
and express the brand and the end goal here of brand personality is to make the
brand a lot more human and a lot more relatable because our audience are
humans and that's how they connect with people through characteristics they
decide whether or not they like a person based on the characteristics that they
display and it's the exact same with brands as well how they connect how
people connect doesn't change they look for certain characteristics and
depending on the characteristics they see they decide whether or not they're
attracted to them now all of this happens on a subconscious level but the
end goal here is clear brand personality is there to make the brand a lot more
human and a lot more relatable now when you go and put messages out into the
marketplace you're trying to express to your audience why they should look at
your brand why you're different what that value is that is gonna make a
difference in their lives and what we say to our audience is very very
important but how we say what we say is becoming increasingly
important because more and more consumers are looking for that human
connection they want to feel that the brands that they do business with are
more than just this corporate entity and they want to feel that human connection
so that's the end goal of brand personality and that's what we need to
do with our brands is to make them more human so that they're more relatable to
our audience so why is brand personality so effective well this goes back to what
I just said before about how we all connect now as people we're all different
we all have different characters we all behave in different ways we like
different things and that's what makes us human what makes us unique and we
display our characteristics to show others why we're unique and what we're about
but at the same time we also read other people's characteristics to decide
whether or not we like them now this goes back to the old reptilian brain and
our human instinct to decide whether or not somebody is a threat or whether
somebody is gonna help with our survival so we're reading characteristics all the
time this happens on a subconscious level and people are judged every day
based on their characteristics by the people around them and that's how we
have the people in our lives that we have in our lives because we've judged
their characteristics and we've decided that we want those people in our lives
now family is different in family we don't really get a choice there
they're just in our lives anyway but certainly with friends we decide
on the characteristics of those friends and we decide what characteristics we
like and you'll tend to find that the people that are in your lives have
characteristics that you're attracted to and it's the exact same with brands we
make subconscious decisions of our brands based on the characteristics that
they display and if we like those characteristics if they display
something that we're attracted to we often make a decision often on a
subconscious level about whether or not we're gonna do business with that brand
so if your brand is out there in the marketplace displaying characteristics
that your audience are attracted to and your competition is not well then you
have an edge over your competition in the market because you are connecting on
a human level so how do we go about developing personalities for our brands
well there are many tools that you can use out there but my go-to tool is
brand archetypes now brand archetypes are a framework that were developed by
Carl Jung they weren't actually developed as brand archetypes they were
just developed as archetypes and it's a framework of twelve personalities that
represent all human personality so my personality is more aligned to one of
these archetypes and your personality will be aligned to another they might
be the same they might be different but essentially each and every one of our
personalities is most aligned to one of these archetypes now the reason
that's so effective when it comes to developing a personality for your brand
is that you can identify an archetype that's most aligned to who your audience
is you can identify what their core desires are and what characteristics
they display and also what characteristics they're most attracted
to and then we can go about developing a personality and assigning an archetype
to the personality we want to develop for our brand so they're a really really
effective tool when it comes to developing a personality for your brand
because we can understand who our audience is and assign them to an
archetype and then develop an archetype that is best suited to attracting who
they are so that is the tool that I recommend that you use when it comes to
developing your brand personality for your brand but even there it's only the
starting point this is just a framework and essentially this gives you let's
call it a silhouette for your personality you still need to shine a
light on the details and fill in the details of that personality so it's more
relatable and more human and actually feels like a human person now if you've
come across the term brand archetypes before then you'll have most likely seen
the articles and the quizzes that you have where you'll be able to answer a
series of multiple choice questions and it will tell you at the end what your
brand archetype is but these are flawed because they're multiple choice
questions each one of those answers is aligned to a certain characteristic and
by the end of the quiz you'll have clocked up more characteristics than
others and there you're assigned an archetype but archetypes are a lot more
than that and there's certainly a lot more useful than just following a
multiple-choice quiz and if you really understand how they work then you can
really get down into who your audience is and cover what they like what they
dislike and then assign an archetype that is most likely to attract who your
audience is so go beyond just the brand archetypes quizzes that you see out
there when you really understand brand archetypes and how to use them
effectively then you can really go about developing an archetype and a
personality that is effective in connecting with who your audience is
and with that in mind it's really important to remember what
branding is all about here we're trying to shape perceptions so we need to
understand who the audience is so we can understand the mind where the
perceptions believe that we're trying to shape and this brings us again back to
the reptilian brain we need to understand their reptilian brain and the
fears and desires that are controlling their subconscious decisions if we
understand that we understand the characteristics that they're attracted
to then we have the information that we need to develop a personality that can
actually connect on a human level and can ultimately sway their decisions and
shape the idea of your brand in their mind but I'd love to know from you if
you learned anything new at all in this video if you did hit that subscribe
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I'll see you in the next video!