How Startup Companies Define & Build Brand Personality (3 Easy Steps)

As a startup company, you need to know how to define your brand personality before you can start building a brand personality.

But what is the definition of brand personality to begin with? What is the specific personality of your brand?

By the end of the article, you'll know how to define your brand personality so you can market to a modern audience and grow your company in three steps.

1.       Researching the consumer and competition
2.       Creating a unique selling point for marketing
3.       Tracking and refining data for company growth

What is Brand Personality?

Brand personality refers to the human characteristics consumers associate with a brand. The stronger the connection, the more likely an audience is to incorporate your brand into their lives.

One of the oldest examples of brand personality is the fictional Quaker Oats mascot, coined in 1877 to extoll the virtues of simple integrity and honest spending.

The Quaker Oats character was an innovative, original brand marketing strategy that no one had ever seen before . . . in 1877.

Today, developing a brand personality requires new levels of innovation that go beyond mascots and catchphrases. In order to grow, startup companies must align authentically with buyers’ needs, motivations and beliefs.

Step 1: Research (Consumers & the Characteristics of Brand Personality)

Brand personality research shows the modern consumer no longer makes a strong human connection with brand mascots, logos, symbols and color schemes.

As Vol. 34 of the Journal of Marketing Research states, consumers use products and services to develop “‘an ideal self’ . . .  through the use of a brand.”

Basically, the connection they seek is more personal. The modern consumer connects with your product or service in a way that’s centered around them and their life.

For the most part, they don’t focus on who’s making it. They care about what it does for them.

A logo with a snappy slogan also doesn't resonate as well as it once did because processing this information pushes the average person’s 8-second attention span to the limit.

Developing a brand today requires a strategic approach to earning attention and building trust over a series of consecutive engagements. And building a brand requires a data-driven system for measuring and improving the performance of those engagements.

Sounds like a lot. Where should you start?

One of the best brand personality strategies is to research your competitors. Is their messaging all about themselves? The more relevant your brand personality is to your audience's needs, the more trust it will earn. Set your brand apart by developing customer-centric messaging they will relate to.

Once you've identified how your brand personality can outshine the competition, what's next?

Step 2: Brand Personality Development (Defining, Describing, and Building)

Building a brand personality requires a unique selling point. Otherwise known as a value proposition statement, a unique selling point is how a brand differentiates itself from the rest of the market in a meaningful way.

A powerful way to do this is to define your brand not by the product or service it offers, but by the problem it solves. When your brand represents a unique solution to the problem your buyers want to solve, it creates a unique value in the market. 

The message your brand personality conveys should also align with your target consumer’s personality. How will your solution have a positive emotional or social impact on them? 

Standing out from the competition isn't just about attracting attention. It's how to define your brand personality and start building brand characteristics that will contribute to long-term growth.

Once you can articulate how your company is truly different, your brand will have more than a personality. It will have marketable brand story.

Your company can develop a brand personality by starting with 3 essential exercises:

• Unique Selling Proposition – How your product or service is different from that of competitors. Avoid claims like “better” and consider a unique process or element that represents a true point of differentiation – something no other brand can copy. 

• Value Proposition Statement –The benefits your USP will bring to customers. How will they define success? How will your unique solution help them achieve it? How will it help them avoid failure? This is the “value” your brand represents to them.

• Mission Statement –An internal pledge to keep your company focused on its core promises.

The goal is to generate a demand for your product or service by describing it in a unique way that your audience cares about (not just a novelty change, one with a real purpose).

Whether it’s an entirely new solution or an innovative approach to an existing solution, every company can find a way to express a unique advantage. However, competitive positioning is a concept that companies often struggle with. But when they get it right, everything else falls into place. This is where the best marketing consultant or agency can help.

Step 3: Growth Marketing for Startups

Growth marketing in the digital age puts your company website at the core of a scalable customer acquisition pipeline.

Using a systematic approach to growth, website visitors are converted into leads; leads are converted into sales opportunities; and those opportunities are converted into new customers.

Messaging strategy – driven by your brand personality – is responsible for moving buyers into and through your pipeline. Leveraging data to measure performance at every step will take the guesswork out of profitable growth.    

Developing a brand’s personality is a continuous process that needs to be tested and refined with a growth marketing strategy that improves revenue each quarter. The more data you have, the more you’ll understand the characteristics of your target consumers and how to define your brand personality to better reach them.

With a website and a growth marketing strategy, your startup company can leverage valuable data from visitors to improve your brand personality. Tracking the right website data (traffic, conversions, page views, bounce rates, etc.) is how to see which parts of the website are being visited the most, how your website is being found, and what visitors want from you next.

Creating Brand Personality with a Growth Marketing System

Building brand personality is how you can get the customer thinking positively about what your brand can do for them – something that only your company offers – and growth marketing is how you deliver this message while measuring progress for sustained quarter-over-quarter growth. If it sounds like a lot, a startup consultant can help you realize what your brand personality is and how to create a unique marketing strategy to grow your company.