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Does every brand need personality in marketing? The short answer is yes, and every brand has some personality in its marketing anyway. It could be stiff or fun or something somewhere in-between. But how do we find the right personality for our brands, and more importantly: How do we implement it?
Let’s get started and look at the following:
- What does it mean to have personality in marketing?
- How do we know what the brand’s personality should be?
- What are the best ways to implement a brand’s personality?
What does it mean to have personality in marketing?
Personality means that a brand has a unique voice and carries that voice through all the different content channels, including online, in sales, and even at conferences. So if the brand is supposed to be go-getter fun, let’s hope the team doesn’t show up in stiff ties and suits at an expo. Instead, wear something that fits the brand!
Personality is about standing out. That doesn’t mean a brand has to be overly sensational, but it means that it’s clear what the brand personality should be and what kind of language is used.
A good example that comes to mind is MANSCAPED. Their messaging is slightly over the line – for some people – but it also gets the point across and is highly memorable. For example, MANSCAPED flew an airplane banner up and down the beach that said, “We love beach balls.”
The personality that MANSCAPED brings to their marketing – everywhere – helps them stand out and gets men (or their significant others) to consider grooming below the waist.
Read next: How to Define Your Value Proposition
How do we know what the brand’s personality should be?
It does come back to marketing basics:
- Who are you trying to reach?
- What problem are you solving for them?
- Do you understand what kind of communications they respond to?
- What kind of outreach works with them?
- Etc.
Somebody somewhere recently online opined that all these brands are now trying to make their prospects and target audiences laugh. So everything is witty, a play on words, and the occasional dad joke might even slip in there. And this phenomenon has happened because brands are trying to influence through personality in their messaging. And getting the audience to laugh – or at least chuckle – is one way to do that.
What are the best ways to implement a brand’s personality?
I’ve seen plenty of marketing strategies or voice guides that are very well-written! Yes, this is awesome! But then it needs to be implemented, and that includes:
- Get buy-in from leadership and executive sponsor support
- Rollout to a select few potential champions to get started
- Launch to the key stakeholders that will be most involved in the implementation – like the marketing, communications, and public relations teams as a whole
- Company-wide rollout, including:
- Short announcement explaining what’s going on, why it’s happened, and how it will help the company
- Publish guidance on brand voice, public interactions, etc.
- Offer training sessions
- Provide feedback and ongoing guidance in a non-threatening manner
- Measure the impact – through media mentions, share of voice, search, and conversions taken by the consumer
You can also use tools like Copylime and Grammarly to get an idea for certain tones and check how something that was written may sound to readers.
In the artificial intelligence tool Copylime, for example, you can tell it the tone you want for a headline. Anything from funny to witty to professional are just three of the options to choose from.
Grammarly tests the tone of content on the backend. For example, an early version of this article showed as being direct, curious, and confident.
So there are software solutions that allow you to help hit the tone, and, of course, don’t forget to work with internal humans as well to keep sharing the brand’s right personality in communications.
Creating a personality in marketing for a brand, and when it’s done well, can help that brand stand out and increase awareness, and at the end of the day, that’s the point of what good marketing teams do. So creating and then implementing that appropriate and unique brand voice matters.