A Brand's Most Important Quality

I have worked with more than one hundred brand leadership teams to carefully craft their brands' personalities as a part of our brand positioning workshops. The four most chosen personality attributes are "innovative," "trustworthy," "reliable" and "responsive." For a full list of most chosen personality attributes, go to this blog post. 

But I would contend that the most important brand personality attribute is "likable." If you like a person or a brand, you are more likely to listen to them. If you like them, you are more likely to do something for them including purchase something from them. The most successful salespeople are likable. Yes, they need to be hard working and competent, but most importantly, they need to be likable. 

Consider the appeal of the Pillsbury Doughboy. How about Tony the Tiger? Consider how likable GEICO's gecko is. Progressive created its own character Flo. And Aflac has its duck. 

A key component of the Southwest Airlines brand is its fun employees. Delta Airlines took a cue from Southwest and created its own fun safety videos. 

Research has shown that a sense of humor/makes me smile/makes me laugh is one of the most important attributes in choosing a life partner. 

Suffice it to say that for your brand to be as successful as it can possibly be, it needs to be likable. Do you know how likable your brand is? What are you doing to insure that your brand is likable? 

Brands and Identity

Brands create identities for organizations or their products or services.  One definition of identity is “the collective aspect of the set of characteristics by which a thing is definitively recognizable or known.”

To understand identity better, lets think about how identity is determined for people. A person is identified in the following ways:

• His name
• His body and face
• His facial expressions
• His voice
• His mannerisms
• What he wears
• What he drives
• How he carries himself
• His personality
• His beliefs
• His attitudes
• His values
• His habits
• His behaviors
• His occupation
• His hobbies
• His fingerprints
• His ocular scan
• His DNA

How can these human identity attributes inform brand identity? Brands can have some of the same attributes, while they also have others. Here are some of a brand’s identity attributes:

• Name
• Icon
• Type fonts
• Color palette
• Visual style
• Other distinctive visual elements
• Brand voice
• Distinctive sounds
• Jingles or theme songs
• Distinctive scents
• Distinctive textures
• Personality
• Beliefs
• Attitudes
• Values
• Behaviors
• Spokespeople
• Characters

The idea is to create a brand identity that is multi-faceted, nuanced, robust, distinctive, likeable, compelling and consistently presented (with some room for spontaneity or surprise). Ultimately, the identity is intended to create recognition, recall, distinctiveness and likability. Each and every identity element should be able to encode and decode positive associations in people’s brains.

I wish you great success in crafting a compelling identity for your brand.