Creating brand characteristics is a big part of the discovery session I do with my clients. The best way I can describe it is: who do you need to be for your dream customer?
When you’re branding it’s important to start with that dream customer and know all the details. Age, gender, job, family, education, living arrangements, what services they use, what keeps them up at night, and what are their values and beliefs. The more complete of a persona you can create the easier curating your brand will be.
It’s absolutely fine to have multiple ideal customers but make personas for each of them. If you help both men and women, create a persona of a male customer and a persona of a female customer. If you offer different services for different people create a persona for each service.
What are brand characteristics?
Once you know (like really know) who your customers are, ask yourself, who you need to be for them. A great example is a fitness trainer. Some people love the hard-ass shout-in-your-face break you down and build you back up trainer. Maybe “hard-ass” is one of your brand characteristics. This is where you get to match how you like to work with who you like to serve. If your dream customer loves the hard-ass trainer but you don’t like yelling at people, it’s time to go back to the drawing board.
We recommend coming up with 5 brand characteristics for your business. These should also be very specific (a thesaurus might come in handy). For example are you smart, or are you witty? Are you a genius? Or are you wise? These all have slightly different meanings and connotations and these slight variances can make all the difference. Push past your boundaries and be sure to avoid clichéd words. We RARELY let a client pick the word “professional”. All businesses want to be professional, it’s not unique and doesn’t differentiate you for your client. Of course, your dream customer wants to visit a professional (fill in the blank).
How to use your characteristics
While we narrow this exercise down to 5 characteristics, it doesn’t mean that you’re NOT anything else. Having 5 main ones keeps messaging and branding consistent. You can use these 5 words as a test for different marketing pieces. For example, do your emails make you sound wise? Or the Facebook post you just made? Just because you are wise doesn’t mean you aren’t compassionate or relatable, or friendly, it just means (in this example) that wise is higher up on the priority list for who you need to be for your clients.
Take some time this week to ask yourself what your brand characteristics are and if you are using them consistently. Drop some words describing your business in the comments! We would love to hear from you.
Want your own brand characteristics?
Whether you need a full rebrand or want to work through our Brand Mastermind course, there are a number of ways to get brand characteristics for your business. Don’t hesitate to reach out to us to figure out what best suits your needs.