Treat Your Brand like a Human

Yes, think about it. Just like humans, a brand thrives on connection. It’s all about creating meaningful relationships, building trust, and relying on that gut feeling you get when you meet someone new. We, people, develop our trusted circle of family, friends, and community around us that allows us and supports us to be our best selves. 

For brands, the trust circle includes clients, partners, vendors, and influencers. All people. People with opinions, wants and needs, values and preferences. As you can see, decisions and responses are based on emotional rather than strategic considerations. For that reason, it is important to make your brand as human as possible to establish an emotional bond between your ideal client and your brand to build a thriving and long-lasting relationship.

How do we do it? 

When developing your brand, we treat it like a person. It already has a name, right? So why not go further, and build an entire brand-being around it? In the discovery stage of our Clearly Branded journey, we determine the following things:

Brand Personality: 

You position your company between pairs of extremes: serious or playful, subtle or bold, casual or elegant? It hones in on how you’d like your brand to be perceived. It sets the tone for the entire brand-building journey and helps with decision-making.

Brand Values: 

We determine your fundamental, unshakeable, deeply-rooted belief system that differentiates a solid brand with a planned future from a wishy-washy brand that floats with the trends and might crumble at any moment. It is a set of underlying principles that show up in your business practice every day. These are the heart center of your brand and guide every aspect of the way; the way your brand shows up, behaves, looks, and sounds. 

Brand Archetype: 

Here we dig deeper into your brand’s personality and soul-search its essence by applying 1 to 2 of the 12 Brand Archetypes. Deriving from psychologist Jung, these are universal human roles and mental shortcuts to help us better understand the psyche of a brand, its deepest fears, and noblest intentions. This way, we can creatively and intuitively resolve brand inconsistency and enhance trust with your ideal clients. 

Brand Voice: 

This is the way your brand communicates. Here the brand’s personality is expressed by its voice, responses, communication style, how it interacts with your clients, and its point of view across all the different channels (written, video, audio, and in person). Measuring each message, blog, reply, and bit of communication against your brand personality is vital. Does it match up? Does it sound like your brand? 

Brand Appearance:

And finally, your visual appearance, meaning your logo, graphics, colors, typography, website, social media graphics, packaging, email signature, signage, and so on. It is the face of your brand and often the first thing people see and judge. So, it must be spot-on and clearly reflect your brand’s personality. Supported by messaging, it quickly filters out who you are for and who not, attracting your ideal people. We are going for love at first sight! 

So here you have it: a unique human brand with its quirks, likes, opinions, beliefs, and distinct look, happy to help and make your life easier. Sounds familiar? Maybe like a good friend you know? That’s what we want your brand to achieve. A brand that becomes familiar, moves hearts and minds, and your organization forward. 

Let’s humanize your brand and figure out all its quirks and personality traits. Let’s start with a quick 20-minute conversation (face-to-face, human-to-human over zoom)