What do Patagonia, Allstate, Campbell’s Soup, and Oprah have in common? Admittedly, not much at first glance, but consider these brands’ personalities: thoughtful, compassionate, comforting, down-to-earth, honest, pleasant, and transparent. Most importantly, they’re sincere.
These brands are what marketers call “sincerity brands,” one of the designations that comprise the concept of “brand personality.” Pioneered by behavioral scientist and marketing professor Jennifer Aaker in a landmark 1997 journal article, brand personality is useful as a tool for developing and honing a sense of “who” a brand is.
Talking about a brand’s personality might seem irrelevant to brand identity or positioning, but it’s actually critical information when it comes to marketing strategy, says branding agency Ignyte. “It may seem like a soft and fuzzy concept, but the world’s most valuable brands have personalities that are instantly familiar to their customers.”
What Is a Brand Personality?
At its most basic, a brand’s personality is how you might describe the brand if it were a person, explains a recent Hubspot post. Viewed through the lens of marketing and advertising, brand personality gives consumers something to relate to. And just as our own individual personalities help us differentiate ourselves from each other and find other humans with whom we share values and interests, brand personality helps consumers connect with brands that reflect some aspect of who they are and what they aspire to become.
Brands express their personalities through messaging and imagery in their marketing and advertising campaigns, but also through their websites, packaging, and interactions with customers. Whenever and wherever the brand connects with customers, its personality is expressed. For this reason, consistency is critical to establishing a brand personality, say marketing experts. “Social media accounts, marketing campaigns, and marketing materials should all reflect the brand story, personality, and tone of voice you chose when you built your brand,” says an Adobe blog post.
Consistency is key. “Like people, brands have recognizable characteristics that stem from the way they think and feel about the world,” explains Ignyte. “The more relatable and consistent your brand personality is, the more your audience will come to recognize it.” Strong, memorable brands have personalities of all kinds; what sets them apart from other brands is not so much the personalities themselves but the fact that those personalities hold up across consumer touchpoints.
What Is a Sincerity Brand?
Sincerity is one of the five or so brand personalities that are widely recognized and used by marketers. Similar to archetypes, these personalities are less “types” and more categories. A brand personality can encompass many traits, and brands can carry traits of several personalities, with one or two taking the lead.
Sincerity
In sincerity brands’ messaging and advertising, they project care, warmth, friendliness, and a wholesomeness that feels authentic. Authenticity is indeed one characteristic of sincerity brands, and these brands often reinforce authenticity through transparency about corporate values and the ways they live up to their promises. While many brands such as Disney, Madewell, Pampers and Hallmark fit the sincerity mold, Patagonia is perhaps the one most often cited as a sincerity brand. From its simple, powerful mission statement — “We’re in business to save our home planet” — to its commitment to reducing its environmental footprint and its transparency about those efforts, Patagonia projects the honesty, responsibility, and down-to-earthness that are the hallmarks of sincerity brands.
Competence
Intelligent, reliable, and successful, competence brands “are the brands we trust with the most important things in our lives, including our money, our health, and our safety,” says Ignyte. While there are competence brands (and brands with competence traits) across every industry, brands in fields like finance, logistics, and healthcare tend to cultivate competence traits. Blue Cross Blue Shield, American Express, Microsoft, and UPS are well-known competence brands.
Excitement
Excitement brands are daring, high-spirited, and creative. Their messaging is about pushing boundaries — personal, cultural, technological — and their high-energy marketing is often targeted at youthful consumers. Energetic, imaginative, and cutting-edge, excitement brands “traffic in unlocking wonder or thrills,” says Ignyte. Nike embodies the excitement brand personality, as do Red Bull, Ferrari, and Virgin.
Sophistication
Targeting consumers who want the best of the best, sophistication brands are classy, elegant, luxurious, and charming. High-quality materials and thoughtful design are part of the appeal, and serve as justification for the higher prices common among sophistication brands. “Brands with a sophisticated personality play on our desire for premium, elevated products and experiences,” says Ignyte. Chanel, Apple, Mercedes, and Rolex are examples of sophistication brands.
Ruggedness
Durability, hard-working, and often outdoorsy, ruggedness brands communicate unpretentiousness and a connection to nature. These brands value authenticity and faithfulness to core values, two things they share with sincerity brands, but they often have a physicality and toughness about them too. Some well-known ruggedness brands include Yeti, Jeep, Jack Daniel’s, Levi’s, and Harley Davidson.
How Can I Make My Brand a Sincerity Brand?
Consider the sincerity brand’s most commonly listed traits: honesty, wholesomeness, cheerfulness, caring. A blog post by marketing platform Tailwind adds qualities like calmness, decency, morality, warmth, and generosity to the mix.
Do aspects of your brand’s identity, story, or core values line up with any of those traits? Without stretching beyond authenticity, are there ways to emphasize these traits?
Consider how you might represent sincerity brand traits in your marketing, advertising, and messaging. Extending further, how might you express these characteristics in experiential marketing events like brand activations, pop-ups, and other face-to-face interactions with consumers?
“Brand personality is how your company expresses itself through its tone of voice, core values, beliefs, and visual identity,” says Adobe. Starting from a place of clarity about your brand’s authentic personality, look for ways to share your brand’s story and values visually and creatively. Working with marketing and branding experts can be a way to shorten the journey toward full expression of your brand’s personality.
At every step, keep in mind that the goal of identifying and expressing your brand’s personality is finding your true audience — the people with whom your brand will resonate most strongly — and building authentic emotional connections with them. Brand personality helps customers relate to brands with whom they have something in common. “And it also inspires you to connect with certain brands that demonstrate characteristics you hope to develop,” says Hubspot. In that sense, for the customer, brand personality is aspirational. Connecting with brands that embody traits we value will, we hope, make us more fully embody those traits ourselves.
