Branding Reason

Starting Conversations with Your Fans - Part 2

We know that starting conversations with your fans can be tough. Social media marketers must be able to find a balance between creating natural, engaging dialogues and trying to sell your product to your audience. As we discussed in the introduction of this series, the key to forming a relationship with your audience is to find your branded voice - the tone, language and personality that embodies your brand and which your audience identifies with. Step one was to author your positioning statement, which is the true goal of your business. Disneyland doesn’t operate an amusement park, it delivers a magical experience that brings families closer together. Step two of this process is to identify your brand’s personality attributes. Click below to continue reading.

Just like all of us, brands have a personality as well. You may remember in the 80s that Pepsi become “the choice of new a generation.” Echoing the audience Pepsi aligned itself with, its personality was young, hip, energetic and risk-taking. Your company’s brand has a personality too, but you need to uncover what it is. You can realize this by analyzing what it is you’re selling (your positioning) and to whom you’re selling it to (your audience).

Your product or service has inherent personality attributes associated with it. For example, if you sell furniture, you may think creative and artistic or warm and homey. If you sell computers, you may think technical and geeky or modern and trendy. These same characteristics can be used to describe your brand. You may also chose to go against these stereotypes; reinvent your category. If your business is normally associated with perceived negatives, such as slow, antiquated or conventional, fight against these stereotypes, but ONLY if your product can support it. Hipstamatic can’t call itself modern, so instead it uses retro. It’s a nice way of saying reinventing the past. Remember that these attributes need to be authentic to your product or service and should help you to stand out from the competition. If every hardware company focuses on durability, maybe you need to align with a different characteristic.

What you really want to try to avoid is saying your personality is cheap or inexpensive. That is not a personality attribute, or at least not a positive one. No one wants to be seen as cheap. Your product may be very affordable, but that doesn’t mean your personality is cheap. A possible personality type is frugal, but remember that frugality may indirectly imply a lower quality product. 

Your target audience also determines your brand’s personality. You want to create a brand that your audience can identify with and relate to, so echoing their thoughts and behaviors is natural. If you understand and know your audience, this should be easy. Quiksilver knows their audience is athletic but relaxed, youthful but ageless, and echo-friendly but rebellious. When this becomes complicated is if your market is too wide, all-inclusive or split. Many companies think that everyone is their target audience. It’s fine to have a wide-reaching secondary audience, but your primary audience has to be more clearly defined. Sure, everyone needs cleaning chemicals, but we all know the primary target is really that powerful, soccer mom, domestic goddess, housewife. That gives you a more focused understanding of who you are trying to reach. Apple knows that many different types of people love to use their computers, but their bread and butter, their primary audience member, is the fashion-forward college student for whom technology is an extension of who they are and using an Apple product makes a statement about how they want to be perceived. Combine these characteristics to create a personality that your audience relates to, but also stands out from the competition. 

Stay tuned, next week we will be discussing step three and taking a closer look at your target audience’s experience with your product or service.