What is your brand’s personality?
I thought I’d start this blog post off with a little story about my early design days as a student at one of Canada’s most well-known universities. I was over the moon at the fact that I was accepted into this highly-respected design program, especially considering that my “portfolio” was a compilation of pencil drawings, watercolour paintings and other mixed media pieces. It was the late 1990s where typewriters were still used in typing class and our art lab had one computer with a floppy disk drive. Needless to say social media didn’t have an existence yet and I was using a paint program versus the full Adobe suite and Canva on my MacBook Pro (which I currently can’t imagine my life without).
And I was struggling a bit. I had just entered the world of design and didn’t really understand what it was all about. I was 19, fresh out of high school and sure, I was exposed to brands in the stores that I shopped at and the magazines that I read, but I had never actually created one for a company and honestly didn’t know where to start.
But one of my professors explained how to create the visuals of a brand so simplistically that it has stuck with me for the past twenty-five years, which is what I would like to share with you.
If you start to think about your brand as a person, it can make the process of answering key questions and developing a signature style much, much easier.
So here are a few of the questions you can ask yourself. Now these may look familiar and that is because they most likely are. They similar to the core questions that brand strategists, designers and marketers often ask.
If your brand were a person…
How would your brand act? Would it be soft-spoken and shy? Would it be outgoing? Would it be cool, calm and professional?
What would your brand dress like? What would be your brand’s style? Would it wear tone-on-tone earthy shades accented by pastel colours or would your brand love standing out with bright coloured clothes and shoes?
What would it sound like? How would it speak? For example, would your brand speak in a casual and conversational tone or would a corporate and professional tone be more appropriate?
Who would your brand’s competition be and what would they look like? Would your brand look similar to them or would they want to be completely different to stand out in a crowd?
And If your brand were giving a presentation, who would be in the audience? Who would be your brand’s biggest fans? And what would they think of your brand’s style? The audience in this scenario would translate into your brand’s clients and customers.
Picturing your brand as a person can often make the task of asking important questions about your brand values, visual characteristics and competition a bit easier as you can start to visualize what your brand could possibly look like and who would be drawn to it. And although the questions above are just a starting off point for you, they can be used as a guide to get started on making important brand decisions.
Although it is important to understand that although branding is a complex concept that often takes companies years to develop and produce successfully, for a small business owner DIY-ing their way through everything marketing-related, it’s important to have a starting point so that you aren’t getting stuck in the “where to start” phase. And I hope that this little tip on how to think of your brand will move you forward as you start to design, develop and refine your marketing visuals.