Brand Persona Guide: How To Develop a Brand Persona

Authenticity matters for brands. Research shows it correlates with purchase intention, and marketing theorists believe authenticity—defined as continuity, reliability, originality, and naturalness—is becoming more important to consumers over time.

The challenge is that brands aren’t individuals. They’re a combination of what the people behind them value and what market research suggests target audiences want. Maintaining authenticity without a single point of reference can be tricky. Creating a brand persona can help.

Learn more about brand personas, how to build one, and how to use yours to reach your company’s goals.

What is a brand persona?

A brand persona is a representation of your brand as a fictional person. It’s essentially a character profile that answers the question, “If your brand were a person, what would that person be like?” An authentic brand persona can help marketers better understand a brand’s identity, allowing them to create campaigns that consistently communicate what makes a brand unique.

Brand personas relate to brand identities, brand personalities, and customer personas—but there are important points of distinction between them all. Here’s how they differ:

Customer persona vs. brand persona

Brand personas look like customer personas, also known as buyer or user personas. Both frequently include details like name, occupation, hobbies and interests, motivations, goals, desires, and fears. While buyer personas represent fictionalized versions of your business’s ideal customers, your brand persona personifies your brand.

Brand identity vs. brand persona

A brand identity is the complete messaging system—overall design, copy, video, and marketing—that represents a company to the public. It’s the outcome of the branding process. A brand persona is an internal business tool that informs how branding and marketing teams use brand identity systems.

Brand personality vs. brand persona

Your brand’s personality is the set of human personality traits you assign to your brand, such as upbeat and nurturing or passionate and adventurous. It’s one element of your business’s larger brand identity. Brand personas reflect your entire brand identity (including your brand personality).

Example of brand persona

Companies create brand personas for internal use. You won’t publish your brand persona on your company’s site, but you can use it to understand whether a message, approach, voice, or style choice is consistent with your larger brand identity. Think of it as a mental shorthand that makes your brand identity easier to use by attaching brand qualities to a concrete character.

Here’s a sample brand persona for an ecommerce business that sells flower bulbs and seeds:

• Name: Sadie Wilkinson

• Age: 61

• Location: Chattanooga, Tennessee

• Job title: High school math teacher, retired

• Personality traits: Passionate, intense, free-spirited, warm, analytical

• Hobbies: Growing flowers, competing in flower shows, urban farming, DIY house and garden projects, rebuilding road bikes

• Preferred communication channels: Phone, email, print and digital magazines

• Bio: Sadie was raised on a communal farm and studied abstract algebra at the University of Michigan. She’s an analytical thinker and a self-identified hippie who will cite Rumi, Rudolf Steiner, and a handful of recent studies in the same breath. She’s a natural community builder, and she loves sharing her deep knowledge of gardening and flowers with others.

How to develop a brand persona

1. Review your brand materials
2. Fill in identifying and demographic information
3. Outline your brand personality
4. Consider your customers
5. Brainstorm attributes
6. Test your assumptions
7. Design your brand persona

Use these steps as a guide to create your own brand persona: 

1. Review your brand materials

Your brand persona is based on your brand identity, so start by reviewing your brand guidelines to confirm that they’re up to date and accurate. Consider your brand’s visual elements, voice and tone, mission statement, and vision.

Next, review existing brand and marketing collateral—such as blogs, website copy, ads, graphics, social posts, and product descriptions—and select a few pieces that feel in line with your brand values. Ask yourself why they stand out. 

If you can’t quite answer, that’s OK—brand personas exist in part to capture elements of your identity that are difficult to define. Immersing yourself in the best examples of your brand voice and style will help you develop your persona even if you’re struggling to describe what makes your brand unique.

If you’re starting out, a good exercise is to look at brands that you admire and try to pinpoint what makes them stand out. When the founders behind the bodycare brand Fur were trying to define brand identity, they looked at YSL and Chanel.

“We were very inspired by YSL and Chanel, this idea of timelessness and also this idea of trust, which I think has always really motivated us,” says cofounder Laura Schubert in an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast. 

“We wanted to create a safe space, an elegant space where people could examine and reframe their own thoughts about what can be a shameful topic for some people or maybe people who have had negative experiences with body hair in the past.”

2. Fill in identifying and demographic information

Assign your brand basic identifying information, such as name, gender identity, geographic location, age, and job title. If you’re feeling stuck, return to the stand-out brand materials you pulled when you evaluated your brand identity, read a section of copy, and try visualizing somebody who sounds like that.

Don’t overthink it. Remember that personas are internal tools, and you can always make changes later on. There’s also no wrong answer: What matters is that the character you create makes sense to you and your team.

3. Outline brand personality traits

Next, fill in personality traits for your brand. One approach is to start with a list of adjectives. You can jot down those that come to mind or use a search engine to pull up a list of character descriptions and review them for inspiration.

Freewriting—a brainstorming technique in which you write for a set period of time without stopping, editing, or worrying about conventions—is another popular approach. To try this technique, respond to the prompt “Imagine your brand is a person, and describe that person.”

The point of freewriting is discovery, so let yourself get carried away. You won’t use every detail, but digressing into the socks your brand would wear or its preferred type of breakfast cereal is a sign that you’re bringing your brand to life.

Example of freewriting:

He is gentle, patient, and wise. He knows a lot but he meets you at your level. He doesn’t show off and isn’t condescending. He’s seen a lot and is totally unflappable but not boring or bored. He’s compassionate but not sensitive, intelligent but not esoteric—grounded—not excitable. You won’t see him at a football game with his shirt off, but he likes watching sports and has a working knowledge of baseball, football, and soccer and can discuss teams and players from 1960 to the present. 

4. Consider your target audience

Before you fill out more details about your brand, evaluate your ideal customer. The team behind jewelry brand Clocks and Colours likes to think about the needs of its archetypes.

“One of them was Travis Barker,” says Shane Vitaly, creative director of Clocks and Colours, on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast. “Years ago, I said, ‘This is somebody that I really look up to, and I think we could build a brand that would speak to somebody like him.’ So we started designing products that we thought he would look good in.”

An exercise like this can help you determine if your brand were a person, how similar would it be to its customers?

There are other ways to approach this. A luxury brand might create an elegant, self-assured, and mysterious persona to stress differences from consumers. A household goods company might position its brand as harried, happy, and human—just like its audiences.

Be wary of too much similarity, however. A brand persona that could easily belong to one of your customers undercuts your value proposition. It suggests your business doesn’t offer your customers anything. Instead, create a persona that is useful to your customers. The household goods brand’s persona, for example, might possess a degree of efficiency, organization, and counter-cleanliness to which its customers aspire.

5. Brainstorm attributes

Like buyer personas, brand persona profiles come in different shapes. The exact collection of characteristics and attributes you include is up to you. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of common details to consider:

• Name

• Age

• Location

• Bio

• Job title

• Income

• Core values

• Goals

• Fears

• Motivators and decision drivers

• Pain points

• Personality traits

• Educational background

• Hobbies

• Likes and dislikes

• Preferred communication channels

• Favorite author, movie, musical group, or quotation

Developing a brand persona is a creative activity, so brainstorm for a range of data points and select those that most effectively convey information about your brand. Consider income, for example. A brand like Quaker Oats might earn 20% above the US median income, making it a budget-conscious consumer willing to choose mid-market brands over bargain ones when there is a meaningful difference in quality. Hermès, on the other hand, might earn no income, come from an old-money New England family, and find your question gauche. In each case, these details can help guide the brand’s messaging around value and price.

6. Test your assumptions

Before committing to a persona, get input from your team. One method is to approach persona development as a group creative exercise. Have team members join you and work independently to outline personality traits and characteristics for your brand.

When you’re done, workshop the results. If your entire team agrees on the age, core values, and media consumption habits, there’s a good chance those elements represent your brand. Differences are valuable, too. You can compare interpretations, discuss their nuances, and settle on the best option.

Imagine one persona describes your brand as a former professional runner who has moved into collegiate coaching, and one imagines it as a biomedical engineer who is an elite amateur triathlete. You can discuss the subtle difference in tone, voice, and values between those two options and choose the best fit.

7. Design and use your brand persona

A clear brand persona can help your team members design branding and marketing efforts that are consistent with your values, voice, personality, and tone. It’s a tool, so don’t leave it in a document or file it away.

Instead, use a customer persona template to create a formal brand persona, add it to your brand guidelines, and distribute it to your marketing team, using a stock photo, sketch, or digital rendering as a headshot. Consider posting a copy in the office, and model use by referencing your persona in branding and marketing strategy discussions.