Building a Brand Persona: How to Get Started
Have you ever thought about building a brand persona?
If you’re wondering what a brand persona is, then you’re about to learn something valuable that may take your business to the next level. The reason is that today the business world pays a lot more attention to concepts like work-life balance, work ethic, and brand persona than ever.
In this article, you’ll learn:
- What is the brand persona?
- How to differentiate your brand from competitors
- Work ethics that make all the difference
- Where to get started with building a brand persona
A brand persona is a combination of key elements that differentiate a brand from the rest of the market. It may include a number of things such as values, branding, customer service, packaging, pricing, and more. So building a brand persona means developing certain traits, elements, and values to standout from the crowd.
A brand persona doesn’t mean that it is just for the companies. It goes the same for the people too. If you’re a professional individual, you’d have your brand personal based on your dealing, personality, work ethics, and standards.
I want to make it easier for you whether you’re a social media expert, blogger, online marketer, content writer, graphics designer, or a businessman. Once you finish reading this article, you must have a better sense of your brand persona. More importantly, this is vital for individuals and brands that never paid attention to their brand persona.
Here are some basic steps for building a brand persona:
Even if you plan to convert your business into brand then these steps are necessary.
Recognizing Your Voice
A brand persona can’t be established if it is not recognized as different. So for being recognized different, one must recognize it himself. What this means is that you must not copy someone else’s strength, body language, gestures, phrases, and ambitions just to be recognized.
People would start to accept you if you’re different from the rest of the world. It all begins from recognizing your own voice first. See, when you recognize your voice, this means you know your power, and you unleash the superhero inside you.
The same goes for brands. If your brand appears to be similar to any other brand, it wouldn’t be okay for your marketing as well as business growth. In fact, it would be a failure of your branding. The whole idea of building a brand persona is based on differentiation and focusing in on the distinctive elements of your brand.
For example, you know me as a digital marketing guy. So if you go through my About Me page, you would find so many reasons why I’m the digital marketing guy. There are different certificates, pictures of speaking gigs and events that show who I am.
Cultivating the Culture
An essential part of the brand persona is the culture of the organization. It means how you seed the values, traditions, and norms into the organizational structure that reaps the benefits in the long term. To get started with building your brand persona, it’s vital to develop a culture of values that you believe in. So that the whole entity of the brand could act upon those principles.
A lot of organizations have laid down their rules such as zero tolerance towards racism, equal opportunities gender-wise, no discrimination based on religion or nationality, and no acceptability for bullying or harassment.
Culture is quite an important part of the whole picture of your brand persona. So developing a culture does impact the overall shape of the brand persona. As brand persona is somewhat a perception of your brand so it’s vital to have a bright, colorful, and positive image of your brand.
Identity Building
There is definitely a contribution of your “personal identity” in the brand persona. Your appearance, gestures, ethics, and norms would translate into your brand persona. It’s unbelievable that it’s not really possible to fake your brand persona because you’d do what you want to do. Therefore, you’d either expose yourself or come up as a bigger person.
The point I’m trying to make is that your reality is the backbone of your brand persona. It’s fascinating that how a person can infuse his or her personality into the company’s culture, which essentially becomes the part of the brand persona.
For example, if Gary Vaynerchuk is known for hustle, hard work, and struggle, then his employees would somehow would be aware of all these values and traits. And, it would be translating into their actions too.
Being Honest
Being honest doesn’t just mean to be honest with others. It means you should also be honest with yourself. Building a brand persona is a tricky thing. You can’t fake it if you don’t believe in certain things. So rather than trying to add specific things to your company’s culture that don’t belong or exist, one should try promoting the originality.
For example, if you don’t genuinely like web designing, but you know a few things that can help you pull off the web designing jobs, you can’t continue to build your brand persona based on web designing. That’s because it’s not your truth. On the contrary, a brand persona purely relies on your truth.
What’s the takeaway?
It’s simple: you must build your brand positioning based on your reality, truth, and expertise. As said before, there are many elements that combine together to build your brand persona. The more you accept your true power, the easier it becomes to navigate in life and business.
What you don’t to do while building your brand persona is looking at others to copy their traits. For example, you can’t copy someone else’s branding or logo or color schemes just because you like it. You can take inspiration and come up with your own thing. For example, I took the idea of doing Facebook Live Video and so i started doing it frequently to increase and retain my audience.
Brand persona is built your uniqueness, truth, and reality, not on fakeness, plagiarism, and copying others.
So the next time, you think about your brand persona whether you’re a startup or a personal brand, make sure that you remember this article about brand persona.
