What's the difference between brand personality and brand voice?

Personality is the underlying character. Voice is how that character sounds in writing. The same personality can flex tone slightly across contexts, but the character underneath should stay recognisable.

Can a brand have more than one personality trait?

Yes, but usually 3 to 4 core traits work best. More than that, and the personality stops being a clear filter for decisions.

Should brand personality match the target audience's personality?

Not necessarily. Some of the strongest brand personalities deliberately contrast their audience, rather than holding a mirror to them.

How do you keep a brand personality consistent across a growing team?

Give people something more specific than adjectives to work from. The more real-world examples of the personality you can reference, the better.

Can a brand's personality change over time?

The core character rarely changes, but how it's expressed can evolve as the brand matures, the same way a person's core character stays stable while their style changes.

Branding Handbook

Brand Strategy

Brand Personality

Brand personality refers to the human-like characteristics that make up how a brand behaves in the marketplace.

What is brand personality?

Brand personality is the set of character traits that humanise a brand and determine how it appears in the eyes of its target audience.

From warm and playful to blunt and technical, these character traits are expressed day to day through a brand's visual identity and design system, communications and tone of voice, and wider brand behaviour.

Personifying a brand in this way adds a level of emotional depth that allows consumers to recognise and relate to it, making it an important part of brand differentiation.

How brand personality gets built

Start from a real archetype

Ask yourself: if the brand were a person, what role would they have? How would it be seen by others?

Shortlist your personality traits

Elegant and measured. As scrappy as they come. Romantic yet ever so slightly sassy. Whatever best describes the personification of your brand, write it down.

Stress-test your shortlist

Which traits can be best translated visually and verbally? Which will your target audience respond to the most? Answering these questions helps refine your shortlist to a final 3-4.

Embody them through your brand

Use every touchpoint as an opportunity to express this personality, so it becomes synonymous with your brand.

How brand personality works in practice: Jupi

An entirely new kind of AI operating system, Jupi launched into a category that had little personality going for it beyond tech-brand neutrality. Which was all the more reason for it to develop a distinct sense of character.

SaaS

B2B

Jupi

Replacing noise, bureaucracy and bottlenecks with a culture of rapid-fire transparency, Jupi makes every decision feel simple. Surreally simple, that is.

That core creative idea gave way to a precise yet poetic personality that's embodied through every aspect of the brand, no more so than the logo, which depicts Rodin's Thinker, standing up. That surreal expression continues in the Magritte-esque illustrations, as well as the motion style that melts like Dali's clocks.

Outcome: A brand new AI-OS category given its first distinctive shape, driving unique site visitors up 12.4% post-launch.

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