Brand and personalities of brands are tricky concepts to dissect and understand, especially when they need to be understood and translated into singular service-level activity.
As PRs, we are being challenged more and more on the relevance and alignment of our activity with the values and personality of brands, and rightly so. This demand to tie into brand fundamentals isn’t just from our clients, but journalists and most importantly readers and consumers.
Achieving coverage, links and driving search change isn’t as impactful if the campaign content that accompanies and contributes to those gains doesn’t marry up with the brand and what customers expect to see.
We largely assume that most businesses should have a brand personality, identity and tone researched from day one, by conducting market research, establishing the target audience, and understanding the platforms they engage with daily. Most brands likely do have an established brand personality, and others may have built one naturally but haven’t consciously considered it as part of wider marketing output.
For us, these essentials are just one part of a brand’s personality. The other element comes from perceptions and is part of a brand personality that is to some extent, dictated for you by the consumer, but one you can influence through comms and PR.
Creating a rounded brand personality requires multiple channels all working in tandem to communicate the same themes and messaging. From a PR point-of-view specifically, there must be consistency across all comms and messaging. An authentic brand personality through PR is formed over time and should come naturally through consistency and expertise.
To ensure ‘brand’ is a part of your PR strategy, your Digital PR team should be able to answer:
- What are the values of the business in question?
- Who is the target customer and what do they care about?
- How do we incorporate all of this into our messaging and comms?
By answering these questions at the strategy setting stage, your PR team should be able to communicate core messaging of the business that ties into its values, to benefit its customers. This core messaging should acknowledge the target consumer and importantly, it should add value.
For example, that value could be in education, and awareness or it could support causes that are important to the customer. Brand personality is more than just ‘not being boring’, it’s about being consistent, authoritative, and trustworthy, knowing your customer and ensuring values are driven across all communication and content – this has to be an inherent part of all activity.
For us at Impression, understanding brand personality, values, and focus was key in the campaign we recently launched for our client Marmalade, which you can read about here. Without incorporating all we understood about the brand from ideation through to implementation, the campaign wouldn’t have been a success or have had the impact it did on its key customers.
