THIS WEEK: Unveiling brand personality in 2025

MARKETING

Creating a unique brand personality and voice is essential for building meaningful connections with your audience. This strategy involves infusing human traits into your brand, fostering emotional bonds and loyalty among consumers. Here’s how you can develop a brand personality that stands out in 2025.

Key takeaways

• Brand personality essence: Brand personality involves attributing human characteristics to your brand, making it relatable and memorable.

• Establishing brand personality: For startups, envisioning your brand as a character with appealing traits is crucial for attracting and retaining customers. Tools like the 5 Dimensions of Brand Personality and Brand Archetypes are useful for this process.

• Voice and tone: Your brand’s tone of voice extends its personality, shaping how messages are conveyed and perceived. This significantly impacts customer engagement and perception.

Beyond your brand statements

Once you've established your brand vision and mission statements, it’s time to develop your brand personality, voice, and tone. Personifying your brand allows you to connect with your audience on a personal and emotional level. So, how do you create emotional connections to retain customer loyalty? By establishing a clear brand personality and values.

What is brand personality?

Brand personality, much like human personality, sets your brand apart by giving it human characteristics, emotions, and attributes. This makes your brand more relatable and engaging, ensuring it isn’t easily forgotten.

Examples of leading brand personalities

• Amazon: Reliable and trustworthy

• Apple: Sophisticated and trendy

• Land Rover: Rugged and dependable

• Tesla: Innovative and progressive

• Microsoft: No-nonsense and reliable

• WeAreBrain: Innovative and professional

How to establish your brand personality

Imagine your brand as a living, breathing person. What traits would it have to attract and retain customers? To create a relatable and engaging brand personality, consider the 5 Dimensions of Brand Personality developed by Jennifer Aaker.

The 5 dimensions of brand personality:

Jennifer Aaker’s framework identifies five dimensions of human personality, each with specific traits. This toolkit helps you establish emotional connections with your audience, aiding in the development of a sustainable brand.

When you think of any brand, you will see how their brand personalities have one or many human attributes in Aaker’s framework. Marketing executive Felicia C. Sullivan explains how she uses Aaker’s framework to help global businesses establish their brand personality:

Brand archetypes

Carl Jung’s brand archetypes, further developed by Dr. Carl Pearson, represent different types of personalities with distinct motivations and goals. Using these archetypes helps you personify your brand effectively.

To really bring brand archetypes to life, some branding teams have actually allocated fictional and non-fictional characters to an archetype so that you can truly understand what kind of personality the brand would embody.

Brand tone of voice as the extension of your brand personality

Brand tone of voice refers to how your brand communicates rather than what it says. It helps differentiate your brand and gives customers insight into who is behind it. This is especially important for direct-to-consumer brands.

Summary

Establishing a brand personality is essential for creating emotional connections with your audience. By personifying your brand with human traits, you make it relatable and engaging. This leads to higher customer loyalty and more successful marketing efforts. Make your brand a ‘person’ that customers want to interact with, and you’ll build a foundation of happy, engaged, and loyal customers.