We Play in Traffic

Good retailers spend a lot of time thinking about their brand position:  who is the target audience, what do they want and need, how does the brand fit in among the competition, how do our stores and personnel portray that brand?  But I increasingly wonder how much time is spent thinking about the personality of the brand.  First, a bit about what is a brand personality:

• The attribution of human personality traits (seriousness, warmth, imagination, etc.) to a brand as a way to achieve differentiation. Usually done through long-term above-the-line advertising and appropriate packaging and graphics (http://en.mimi.hu/marketingweb/brand_personality.html).

• It is a comprehensive concept, which includes all the tangible and intangible traits of a brand: beliefs, values, prejudices, features, interests, and heritage. A brand personality makes it unique.

• Brand personality is seen as a valuable factor in increasing brand engagement and brand attachment, in much the same way as people relate and bind to other people (http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_brand_personality).

In other words, a retail brand personality is squishy but really important.

Too often the brand personality is left to the art department whose charge is: with no time left on the clock, get some work done to promote X, Y or Z and make it interesting.  Time is often the enemy in good retail advertising.  But if the art group is working without an understanding of how the retailer wants people to feel about the brand, anything can come out.

Here are a few of thoughts to help reflect the right retail brand personality:

1. If you can, get some customers to talk about your brand.  Ask them to describe your brand as a person.  Show them pictures of people and have them pick out the one(s) that most reflect how they view your brand.  Give them a few dozen magazine of different editorial focus and have them clip pictures and assemble a collage of what they believe is the personality of your brand.
2. Sit with this data and study it.  See if that’s how you want to be seen.  If it’s not, get your internal marketing group to do the same thing.  Careful: if what you want to be seen as is radically different than what you are perceived as, something is amiss and you need to do more exploration.
3. Out of the synthesis of these, create what I might call a “brand poster:”  something that shows and describes the personality of your brand as everyone working on it should know it.
4. Talk about the brand personality with everyone that touches the brand.  Make sure everyone understands and agrees with the brand personality.
5. Print copies of the brand poster and put them up in the offices of everyone in that group.

Next time the art group has an assignment, make sure they can hold the work up against the brand poster and tell you straight that the personality in the work reflects the personality of the brand.