These two elements of your brand strategy (brand positioning and brand personality) are definately related but are two distinct parts of your brand’s strategy.

In a nutshell (meaning you won’t have to read much further if you don’t want to) Brand positioning relates to how the brand is perceived within your market in relation to your competitors, while brand personality is all about the more human characteristics that your brand may have.

So you’ve got this far and you now have an idea of the difference, but there’s a lot more to each of course. So let’s dig in a little to understand this a little better.

Brand Positioning

This is really a description of the function and the practice of your organisation or business. And importantly it consists of three core elements. They are:

Brand Vision

This is the goal, or you could think, the ‘big idea’ for your business. But it also relates to the customer. So we’re starting to think here of the big picture, for example for a design agency it may be: “We will be the most approachable and friendly, highly creative content creators where clients come to understand and discover how great design can make a huge difference to an organisation without the ego often associated with designers.”

Market Position

This element focusses on the positioning within the relevant market. So we’re thinking about things such as are we luxury, budget, mass market or more specialist, what age group are we aiming at? What size clients are we looking for? So this could be: “We’re a full service creative content provider that delivers a value for money service to clients from startups to mid sized corporates or third sector organisations.” 

Brand Proposition

This is about what the firm/organisation actually does. This covers your function and story. Here we could perhaps have an example such as: “Simple language, strong delivery, function first design, with an experienced team, but keeping overhead low to offer our clients great value.”

Now the above don’t fully describe our agency, these are just some examples to give you a bit of an idea of each step.

The next step is then to pull each of the above together into a concise statement that quickly communicates your brand. The statement should clearly identify the target audience, the product category, the unique benefit, and the reason to believe…

We’ll leave that for another blog post though…

Brand Personality

This is a lovely part of the branding to work on, we usually have a lot of fun with this one for our clients.

This set of traits will be used to inform all of your customer communications. It will be seen in a tone of voice, it’s values and the nature of the communications and images.

It’s a set of human-like charecteristics that will be associated with your brand. Think about it as how a brand would behave if it was a person. So this is the human side of a brand that makes it more relatable and therefore engaging, via a more emotional connection. It also informs:

Brand ID (Logo) and Identity

Here we’re looking at the design of your logo and the look and feel of all the marketing collaterol you have or need. It’s important that this is consitent across all media and communicates elements of your brand at each point. So if part of your company’s personality is thoughful, then colour may be more muted, rather than brash.

Brand Character

Here we’re giving a description of the manner in which a brand may behave. It’s the communication of the values, and way your brand approaches all it does. In other owrds, the overall approach to what you do. In the same way a person can do something ‘out of character’ we don’t want that for our business. Each interaction should fit within the expectations of that character.

Brand Voice

People each have a different way of communicating, so can your brand. The impoart element is these communications must be consistent and fit tightly to your values and personality. So the copy used must ‘fit’ well with these traits and values.

It would be out of place to use a comedic approach when your firm is more about delivery, for example. If your brand is fun and outgoing to a younger market, then maybe a more irreverant voice is apprioriate.

A New Understanding

So hopefully that helps just a little. It’s not everything by any means, but it’s a taste of the difference between these two similar sounding but very distinct elements of your brand strategy.

Jeff

Caffeine Creative are an experienced team based in the Cardiff area. We help with graphic design, web development, company values, social media, branding, video production, drone shoots, and more. To know more please contact us.