Most companies are full of fear. The employees cower away from new ideas. Scared of making a mistake or neglecting a procedure, they hide their personalities deep down. In the effect, all the messages from the brand are deprived of individuality or uniqueness. They all sound as if they were taken from a universal marketing clichés base. Like “We value our customers’ opinion” or “The highest quality, the lowest price.” They sound like “We are the same as others.”
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Nevertheless, brand personality can become your vital asset at the contemporary market, as Rohit Bhargava proves in his book “Personality Not Included,” in which he figures out what distinguishes average (and possibly profitable) businesses from these that are truly loved by customers.
Liked vs. loved
The liked companies meet all the standard requirements, meaning that they state the proposition of value explicitly (features, benefits, price, action that should be undertaken to get the product). Seems easy? Nothing could be more wrong! On the crowded contemporary market it’s already a tough challenge.
That’s for the brands that are liked. And the loved ones? These have to go one step further. Such companies don’t just communicate their product and the need the product addresses; they want to give audience something more, an intangible surplus that makes brand experience incomparable to anything else.
Brand personality is that surplus.
3 ingredients of brand personality
According to Bhargava, brand personality can be broken down to 3 components:
- Uniqueness
- Authenticity
- Talkability
Uniqueness
Brand uniqueness means that it delivers something that nobody else does.
Imagine that you sell donuts.
On the street where there are 5 more donuts booths.
Your donuts might be the most exquisite, the sweetest and the most aromatic, your salespeople might be the kindest and the funniest people in the area, and you might have the lowest prices imaginable. But despite the objective quality of your service, you won’t succeed.
Move your booth a couple of block, and then you get completely different results. If you’re unique in the area, it’s easier to thrive. You draw attention.
Tips:
- Define what exactly distinguishes your company.
- Search for your niche. Sometimes a great idea to achieve that is to transfer a local product to a different environment.
- Change your niche. Set new rules. Offer meat donuts. Donuts shaped like stars. Create a new donut-eating ritual. Invent a Donut Day.
Authenticity
People often mistake authenticity for transparency. It’s not about telling everything, but about revealing your mission and proving that it’s true. On the contrary to what most marketers believe, customers can easily sense if you’re driven by true passion or just an appetite for quick profit.
Tips:
- Show brand history.
- Show passion! Don’t be afraid to reveal emotions and enthusiasm.
- Hire individuals, not anonymous “people”. You don’t need machines that realize procedures (you have tools and apps for that). You need real ambassadors who believe in your values and will share them with your customers and partners.
- Focus on long term aims, not quick profits. Talk about what you want to change in the world.
Talkability
The third component of brand personality is talkability. It means that something can be translated into a story. For example, if you produce high quality cosmetics, there is no story in it. But if you’re a small company that challenges big corporations and wants more meaning in the business, it you’re a David facing a Goliath – well, that’s a narrative!
It’s like with a gossip: it makes people talk about you. It’s uncommon, surprising and rare.
Tips:
- Offer something that people can share: like an original ebook or other material
- Create limited editions or a limited line of bonuses. Scarcity generates demand: people want unique things and want to talk about them.
Why brands have personality?
Personality is not something all brands own in the beginning and they lose. It’s not limited to start-ups or small local stores. Surprisingly, small companies don’t have personalities because they don’t need them: a stable group of customers who find the store convenient seems enough to them.
Some big brands can preserve their personality through the whole company’s lifecycle.
Do not eat iPod
When a tiny iPod Shuffle was released, the brand added to a package a card saying “Do not eat iPod Shuffle.” You know, because it was small and cute and looked like a candy. Nobody could tell if it was a joke or an official disclaimer. Consumers started do talk about it.
Not many brands would do such a move. The idea would be deemed as too risky, overblown and silly. But that’s what brand personality is about: you have a clear vision of what you do and how you interact with customers, so you know how to behave, even if it means playing bold.
Brands with personality are courageous and walk their own way.
Your employees
The second thing that powerful brands share is their HR philosophy. They put a lot of emphasis on who they hire: and they want individuals. Such brands understand well that their staff is a face of the company, they interact with customers, and sometimes they blog or can change company’s image with their social media activity.
Employees who share your passion have another great quality: they don’t hate customers. When someone works 9-5 and wants just to be over with her tasks, she treats customers like a natural disaster that disturb her. And consumers sense that.
Many companies loathe their audience what leads to absurd situations. Do you remember when Ben Baldenza, CEO Spirit Airlines, wrote in an email regarding complaining customer that “we don’t owe him anything” and “he’ll be back as soon as we get him a discount”
The problem with such approach is not only the possibility of leakage of such messages. You audience can feel it.
To sum up
Brands don’t gain personality in a magical way. It’s not about founder’s charisma. Discovering personality is rather a systematic work in which we reveal company’s core: how it wants to influence the world, and then we confront that answer with 3 questions”
- Is the story unique?
- Is in authentic?
- Is it talkable?
These 3 questions help us distill the true soul of the company.
[The post was based on Rohit Bhargava’s Personality Not Included]
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