Great branding impacts your entire brand presence, including everything you say and do. Your brand's personality is an important — and very visible — part of your that presence that builds favor and trust with your customers. These 4 principles for discovering your brand personality will help you as you nail down your own unique, authentic brand personality.


Good Shortcuts and Bad
Shortcuts can be good. As a kid, I was always looking for a shortcut to the store, so I wouldn't have to walk around the block. But branding is a process. And when you don't understand the process, the shortcuts you choose could actually waste your time and money, at best. And at worst, they could sabotage the whole process, stealing punch and conviction from your results and from the buy-in you'd otherwise get from your stakeholders.

The good news is that most of us have a head start. We see our brand personality traits peeking out every once in a while. But just as soon as that happens, we worry we'll be criticized for being quirky. "Stakeholders want to see responsibility," we say. And then part of our unique personality dies.

But not permanently. It turns out that when this happens, your personality is only mostly dead (thanks, Miracle Max). And a solid process for discovering your brand personality can bring that personality back to life and organize your traits in such a way as to make them usable. Even powerful.
Our Goal: 4 Pitfalls to Avoid and Make You Look Smart With Your Brand Personality Traits
In fact, it's more than that. Because these are just some basic, but high-leverage, rules to make you smarter about branding.
Why Do You Care?
We almost forgot the most important question. For some of you, this is just a refresher. But have you ever worked with someone who consistently communicated confusingly and it made you not trust them? You could tell they didn't have the character to really follow through on what they were promising. You don't want to be that brand.

Then there are those people who seem solid and trustworthy, but they don't seem to really be that savvy with their communication. They might even have a ton of experience in their field, but they just don't seem to quite understand you. They struggle to sort out what you know and don't know and how you think. Although it is a much better situation than dealing with people who lack morals, it's not ideal. It's especially not ideal for a consultative relationship where you'll need to communicate and develop a sense of understanding so that you're not constantly clarifying things for them. Because that's tedious and takes forever.

You don't just want competent people; you want people who get you and who you get in return. Your personality is what tells potential customers that you are competent and understand them.

Brand personality pays dividends.
But is it Really Relevant in B2B?
We might think brand personality matters more for Business-to-Consumer brands. And it definitely has its own character - B2C brands can get away with more because of sheer numbers in their advertising. Their niches can be smaller in proportion to the total world population, while still being large enough to sustain a business. You can see how a B2C company can hyper-specialize with a sense of humor that can gain a cult following. This is a little harder to do in B2B. But it is possible.

In fact, there are some brands that have built a following not because they just happen to be in the right place at the right time, but because they really know who they're talking to and they're not afraid to talk in their language.

For instance, in the defense industry, they might talk about things like "lethality." But you might not talk in such frank and blunt terms if you're talking to a general audience of business people who are more concerned with developing cultures of empathy. But whatever industry you find yourself in you know how your particular audience talks and whether or n...

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