Crafting a Distinctive Brand Personality
When we talk about a brand’s personality, we mean the set of human characteristics we attach to it. We talk about brands the same way we talk about people: Harley-Davidson is rugged and rebellious, Volvo is dependable and sensible, Chanel is sophisticated and a little aloof. None of these brands are actually people, obviously, but we describe them as if they were, and that description shapes how we feel about buying them.
This matters more than it might sound like at first. A lot of product categories are genuinely hard to tell apart on function alone. Most family cars get you from A to B safely enough, most soft drinks taste sweet and fizzy, most banks move your money around competently. When the functional differences shrink, the personality differences are often what’s left to choose between.
Where does the idea of brand personality come from?
The framework most marketing courses lean on comes from research by Jennifer Aaker, published in the Journal of Marketing Research in 1997. Aaker asked consumers to rate a large number of brands against personality traits, then grouped the results statistically, in a similar way to how psychologists had grouped human personality traits into the “Big Five.”
What came out of it were five broad dimensions: Sincerity (down to earth, honest, wholesome, cheerful), Excitement (daring, spirited, imaginative, up to date), Competence (reliable, intelligent, successful), Sophistication (upper class, charming) and Ruggedness (outdoorsy, tough). Most brands lean toward one or two of these rather than trying to claim all five, and that’s worth sitting with for a moment, because trying to be everything to everyone is usually where brand personality goes wrong.
How do we actually build a personality into a brand?
We don’t get a brand personality by declaring one in a mission statement. It gets built, gradually, through every choice a company makes that the customer can actually see or hear. The name, the logo, the color palette, the tone of the advertising copy, the spokesperson we choose, the music in the ads, even the packaging shape, all of it either reinforces the personality we’re going for or works against it.
Think about Harley-Davidson. The rumble of the engine (which the company has, at various points, tried to trademark as a sound), the leather, the tattoos in the advertising, the loyalty events, the Harley Owners Group community, none of that happened by accident. Every touchpoint was pulling in the same direction: freedom, rebellion, ruggedness. Compare that to a brand like Volvo, which for decades built its personality almost entirely around competence and safety, down to the earnest, slightly understated tone of its advertising.
We also use real people, or characters, to carry personality traits that are hard to express through a product alone. Old Spice’s “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign gave a fairly ordinary toiletries category a personality that was confident, playful, and a bit absurd, and it did so almost entirely through the tone of one spokesperson rather than any change to the product itself.
Why go to all this trouble?
The main reason is self-expression. Consumers don’t just buy products for what they do, they buy them, in part, for what owning them says about who they are, or who they’d like to be seen as. Marketers call this self-congruity: we buy brands whose personality matches (or matches the version of ourselves we’re aspiring to). Someone who sees themselves as rugged and independent is more likely to be drawn to Harley-Davidson than someone who sees themselves as refined and understated.
A distinctive personality also gives us something advertising can talk about repeatedly without the message going stale, which is genuinely useful when a product itself doesn’t change much year to year. And a strong personality supports pricing. Sophistication and exclusivity, done well, let brands like Chanel charge prices that would be laughed at if the product were positioned purely on functional grounds (a bottle of perfume doesn’t cost what the ingredients suggest it should).
What can go wrong?
The biggest risk is inconsistency. If the advertising says rugged and outdoorsy but the customer service experience feels cold and corporate, the personality doesn’t stick, because customers experience the brand through dozens of touchpoints, not just the ads. We have to think about the whole system: packaging, retail environment, social media tone, even how staff answer the phone.
The second risk is stretching a personality onto a product it doesn’t fit. Harley-Davidson is the textbook example here. In the 1990s the company licensed its name onto a range of products including a perfume, and it flopped badly, largely because cologne doesn’t sit comfortably next to ruggedness and rebellion the way a leather jacket does. The lesson marketers usually draw from it is that a strong personality is also a constraint: it tells us what we shouldn’t put our name on, as much as what we should.
There’s also the question of aging. A brand personality that resonates strongly with one generation can become dated for the next, and Harley-Davidson has wrestled with exactly this problem, as its core rider base has gotten older and the company has had to work harder to bring in younger buyers without diluting what made the brand distinctive in the first place. Refreshing a personality without abandoning it is a genuinely difficult balancing act, and there’s no formula that guarantees getting it right.
What should a marketer actually do with this?
In practice, we’d usually start by figuring out where our brand currently sits in customers’ minds, often through the kind of trait-rating survey Aaker used in her original research. From there, we decide whether that position is the one we want, or whether it needs shifting.
Once we’ve settled on a personality, the harder job is discipline. Every campaign, every product extension, every partnership gets checked against a simple question: does this fit who we’ve said we are? That sounds simple in a lecture, but it’s a genuine source of internal conflict inside real companies, because a licensing deal or a short-term sales promotion can look financially attractive while quietly working against the personality that got the brand its pricing power and loyalty in the first place.
Key Points to Take Away
- Brand personality is the set of human traits customers attach to a brand, and it becomes more important as functional differences between competitors shrink.
- Aaker’s 1997 framework groups most brand personalities into sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, and ruggedness, with most brands leaning on one or two rather than all five.
- Personality gets built through every visible and audible choice a brand makes, not through a single ad campaign or slogan.
- Self-congruity, buying brands that match who we see ourselves as, is a big part of why personality drives loyalty and supports higher pricing.
- A strong personality is also a limit: it rules out product extensions, partnerships, or tones that don’t fit, and stretching too far (as with Harley-Davidson’s perfume) can damage the brand.
- Personalities need occasional refreshing to stay relevant to new generations of customers, without losing what made them distinctive.
