Does your brand have clear personality traits that encourage your customers to connect with it? Humanising your brand makes it more relatable and this will lead to them choosing you over your competition.

You communicate your brand personality with your content, design and marketing. It should be communicated across any and all customer touch points. Not sure where to start? Here are five key aspects of developing your brand personality.

1. Cohesion and continuity

If your design choices say one thing and your content another, it’s going to confuse your customers. A bright, bold and edgy colour scheme needs to be paired with a confident, audacious and fun brand voice. And you need to continue with this same voice and colour scheme until you intentionally change or tweak it.

2. Likability

Your brand personality needs to be likeable. That doesn’t mean you can’t be adventurous, playful or need to try to please everyone. It just means that your ideal target audience has to like you. Think about what kind of personality traits they will best relate to and use those in your branding strategy.

3. Be different

If you’re not unique—especially when compared to your immediate competitors—you’re forgettable. And forgettable brands get forgotten. Choose ways to communicate your brand personality that are unique to you. Not sure what sets you apart? Consider leading with your ‘why’.

4. Be authentic

People can smell a fake. Plus, you’re going to feel a lot more comfortable maintaining a persona that feels true to you. Being authentic doesn’t mean you can’t be polished or professional. It doesn’t mean you show warts and all (remember point no.2 is likability, after all). It simply means that you need to stay true to the essence of who you are and what you stand for in business.

5. Have a consistent brand personality voice

If your logo didn’t appear with your content, could your audience identify the content as coming from your brand? You want to be identifiable and seen/heard as an authoritative source within your area of expertise. You can’t always rely on visuals. Brand voice is a vital part of the personality pie and it needs to be consistent across the board. Train any of the team who will be working with your brand (or customers) to maintain language and correspondence that is consistent with your brand personality.