Episode 217: What's your brand personality?
Your branding is not just the visual elements. There is so much more to branding than that. In today's episode, Fiona talks about how important brand personality is especially in growing & making decisions as a business. Tune in!
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction
Common Misconceptions About Branding
The 12 Brand Archetypes
Conclusion
Get in touch with My Daily Business Coach
Resources and Recommendations mentioned in this episode:
Hello and welcome to episode 217 of the My Daily Business Coach podcast. I am here with you. I am Fiona Killackey, an accredited business coach. I don't really know if that matters because really there are no regulations out there, but I went, I did it. I don't think it particularly changed anything for me. I would already been doing business coaching for some time, but if it makes you feel better, I'm an accredited business coach. I'm also an author, speaker, and obviously a podcaster, but most of all, my mission is really to help people feel like they can start and scale a small business in a way that is aligned with their values and the way they wanna live their life.
Today, you are listening to a quick tip episode. That's really where I share a tip tool or tactic that can help you in your business, kind of going back to that purpose. So before I get stuck into that, I just want to, of course, acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians on the land, on which I live and work and play and raise my children and the land that has given me so much healing, particularly over the last couple of years. So that is the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. I pay my respects to their elders, past, present, and emerging, and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded. Let's get on with today's quick tip episode.
So today I wanted to talk about something that I think people maybe, maybe they spend some time on it at the start of their business, but as the business grows and develops, or maybe they didn't spend time on it at the start, it comes up as a question time and time and time and time and time again, especially when I'm working with groups or doing workshops, or even one-on-one with clients quite often when we are looking at their business and they wanna take a step in a particular direction. This question comes up. The question is, you know, what's your brand personality? What is the brand like? What do you wanna be known for? What's the personality behind the brand? What kind of, you know, human traits does the brand have? And I think if you haven't worked on branding for your business and by branding, I did not mean just the visual elements of like a logo and a color palette and typography, but I mean the whole part of your brand, like all the elements of your brand. So from your mission, vision values through to the personality of the brand, which is what I'm gonna talk about today, but also, you know, the direction, the function, you know, the values that really are at the core of the brand.
If you haven't worked on that, it makes making decisions as you grow. And as you scale, and as you do different things or maybe pivot for one of a better word harder because you haven't sort of nailed that. And by nailed doesn't mean it's set in concrete. You can change these things, things change and adapt. We're actually changing the brand right now behind the scenes in our business. And so we are coming up against these things again, and I work with this all day long with people. I do a lot of workshops for kind of bigger companies on branding. What does it mean?
We have got a course that we are putting together. It should be out at some point in the future, but it's a huge part of what I work on. And one of the elements of this is your brand personality. So today I thought I will talk about that. I guess it's a tip and a tactic because there are tangible things that you can do to kind of figure out your brand personality. If you don't feel like you've spent time on this.
And again, your branding is not just the visual elements. There is so much more to branding than that. So I kind of wanted to go through firstly, like brand personality so that you get a sense of it, but also talk you through a kind of framework, as you know, I love my frameworks or a concept that will help you develop this further for yourself.
So I guess a brand personality, like I said, if you think about a person's personality, you know, your friend or your sister or your partner, or, you know, some random that you've just, you know, encountered in your life, everyone has a personality and your personality may shift a little bit depending on who you're talking to, but really it's a set of kind of human characteristics that I guess we attribute, or we connect with a particular brand.
So we can all think of, like, if I said to you, what's a really fun brand. I'm sure things come to mind. And if I said what's a really like serious brand or what is a really a brand that really, you know, cares about nature and is really environmental and is kind of the forefront of that. You would think of a brand. If I also said what's a brand that's really, you know, soul focused and really is kind of like a Sage, like is somebody, you know, giving out wisdom, like what sort of brand is that? Or what's like a rebellious brand, someone who's really, the personality is like rebellious and like cheeky.
You would all be able to think of brands that link in with that personification, that brand personality. And so it's really about defining, like, what is the brand personality or type for your brand? You know, what is it? Because sometimes we can get confused between our own personality, especially if you've just, you know, if you run the business by yourself or if you started the business because of a, a gap in the market that you needed yourself, we can often confuse ourselves with that brand. And, you know, there are all sorts of things I could get into there in terms of psychology and mindset. But, you know, we've also gotta be able to take a step back and be like, the brand is, is definitely not you.
But I mean, I guess unless you're like a personal brand and it is completely you, but what is that personality of the brand? What are the characteristics? What is the personal sort of traits of that brand? And again, I don't want people to confuse this with the kind of, we are fun. Therefore, we are all hot pink and cheerleading and, you know, yes, the visual elements can come to support it, but the brand personality should be its own thing that stands. Whether it's talking about imagery or content or writing, or, you know, causes that you get behind or collaborations, it's part of the brand personality.
So one kind of framework that I think helps with this is brand archetypes. So this idea, and it kind of comes from, I think Carl Jung, the idea really that there are these unconscious elements, like personality traits that anyone on the planet can identify these personality traits, regardless of what culture you have come from, how you are raised, what your religion is, what your spiritual practices are, what language you speak. These are things that anyone can identify. These sort of, he thinks that there's 12. So there's kind of 12 archetypes or 12 brand archetypes. And they, they really derive from Carl Jung’s idea that like I'm saying, you know, every person in life and in the story and in art and in film can fit into one of these 12 brand personality kind of archetypes.
And so he believed that these, you know, transcend time and location and they're understood as part of our collective unconscious. And so that's why we can watch the same film as somebody in another completely different part of the world who had a very different upbringing to us, very different beliefs. And we can both identify the villain and we can both identify the kind of pure person. And we can identify all the parts of the story because it's part of the collective unconscious. And so many brands have been using brand archetypes for years and years and years, decades, and decades.
And so it's thought that kind of 80% of our decision-making process happens unconsciously. And we use emotion and instinct and memory and intuition to make most of our decisions. And we are drawing upon that collective unconscious in these brand archetypes to identify that that brand is for me. And so I hope that is making sense, cuz it's a lot to take in if you've never kind of encountered this stuff. And so in the brand archetypes, if you think about a circle and then you divide that into quadrants into four, you kind of have 12 brand archetypes and each quadrant then has three. So in the first quadrant, you have this kind of yearning for paradise. And so the different brand archetypes in those or the kind of personalities are, you know, innocent, the Sage and the Explorer and the Explorer is all about freedom.
The Sage, you know, think about Sage, wisdom is all about understanding. And then you've got the innocent, which is all about safety. And so there'll be particular brands that really work. So for example, this kind of yearning for paradise, this freedom, this Explorer is often related to like a brand like Patagonia. And so, you know, then you've got Sage and understanding and then innocent safety. And you know, back before they got like massively came off their brand promise, but the whole idea of like Volvo and safety, that's very much the safety aspect. And so then you've got the second quadrant, which is, you know, the brands that really wanna leave a mark on the world. And so you've got liberation kind of the outlaw. Then you've got power kind of the magician. And then you've got the mastery, which is the hero. Then you've got the next quadrant, which is really, you know, connecting with others.
And so it's all about intimacy and you've got like the lover and then you've got enjoyment and like the jester. And so maybe a brand like Virgin might very much fit into that kind of enjoyment, live life to the full and kind of just, you know, funny cheekiness then you've got belonging in every man. So the everyman kind of brands are, or every woman or every person are really, you know, about belonging and the community. And so if you think about things like an every man brand would very much be Ikea, you know, everyone can buy, everyone does buy Ikea. It's simple. They're trying to look after the planet as well in some cases. And so it's kind of, it's this, every man Levi's jeans is another one that people often think about with every man, you know, everyone wears their Levi's and in different ways.
And then the last quadrant is really providing structure to the world and you've got kind of innovation, the creator you've got control the ruler and then you've got service, which is the caregiver. And so when you go through like a brand personality quiz and there's so many of them online, you'll often be met with, okay, based on your answers, your brand is Sage understanding, yearning for paradise. And it's also, let's say belonging and they're every man and are connecting with others. And so that can help you then create this kind of brand personality that then makes making decisions for your business so much easier.
So I know that is a lot to get through in a quick tip episode, they're usually 10 minutes or less. I can see that I've gone over slightly, but brand archetypes. Your brand personality is really important, particularly as you grow as a business and as you wanna start doing different things or perhaps, maybe, and goodness knows there's a lot happening in the world right now, you wanna stand for things and you are sort of like, “oh, you know, Ugh”, but it's like if that brand personality, I mean, I sometimes think people should stand for things regardless, but you know, if you are, you've gotta look at your brand personality and be like, yes, we say that we are this. And we are really much, you know, promoting that. So let's actually be true to that and stand up for certain causes or things that you wanna stand up for.
So that is it for today's quick tip episode. If you are interested in this sort of stuff, then you definitely wanna check out Marketing For Your Small Business. If you're a small business, it goes through all sorts of things from your brand to, you know, what are you trying to put out into the world through to, you know, which channels will you use and all of that, you can find that’s at www.marketingforyoursmallbusiness.com. The podcast show notes are for this episode, you'll be able to find over mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast/217. If you found this useful enlightening, maybe something you just didn't know before, please, please, if you could leave us a review, it's just really, really helpful. It makes us easier for other small business owners to find. So you can do that on apple. You can do that on Spotify or any other place that you listen to this podcast. But yeah, thank you so much. And I really hope this helps you find your brand personality. Bye.
