This answer isn’t clear-cut. For brand developers, it’s an issue can be tricky, because the truth is that the brand personality needs to take many variables into consideration. On the one hand, because the personality of a brand is the key to creating an emotional connection with the audience, it would be reasonable for to conclude that the personality should reflect the market. On the other hand, a brand needs to be comfortable in its own skin in order to consistently maintain its personality – and very often, there can be a conflict between the personality that the market wants and the personality that the brand can actually maintain.
It’s too easy to say that the personality of the brand doesn’t need to reflect the personalities of the company’s founders or executives. Their personalities will absolutely play at least a partial role in how the brand’s personality is developed. I have to believe that the key executives behind the popular video-game developer EA, for example, are at least a little edgy and fun. I’d be shocked to find out they all wear three-piece suits to work every day, where they smoke cigars while discussing the moral decline of modern society. But just how influential the personalities of key execs are to the brand may be somewhat minimal, and may instead depend more on the product being sold and the market being reached. In other words, it’s pretty safe to assume that the key execs behind Barbie aren’t eight-year-old girls.
The real answer is that the personality of the brand isn’t reflective of any one entity in particular, but a balance of all of them. There’s no point in the personality of a brand being stuffy and serious simply because that’s the personality of the key execs, because it’ll turn off the market they’re trying to reach. At the same time, there’s also no point in a brand presenting itself as wild, crazy, and edgy simply because that’s what the market wants. If the decision-makers aren’t comfortable in that skin, they won’t be able to sustain that brand personality, and ultimately their efforts will fail.
Every brand needs to find a balance between what the market will respond to and what it can reasonably be expected to consistently present. The point where these two needs meet is the starting point for developing the brand’s personality.
What do you think the brand should reflect?
