10 Best Brand Guidelines Templates (+Tips) | Visme
Written by:
Raja Mandal
Since you're here, it's probably safe to say that you have a brand and want to learn more about defining your brand personality. Having a brand personality is as essential as having a brand identity. It makes your brand unique and attracts customers to buy from you rather than your competitors.
Now here you are, having spent lots of time and money on marketing efforts, only to find out that you are not connected to your customers. This could be due to your brand’s personality traits.
Curious to know more about brand personality? Keep on reading, or navigate through the table of contents to find exactly what you're looking for.
Brand personality is the personification of a brand, i.e., giving human qualities to the brand. Like any human being, every brand has a voice, color and many other attributes that evoke different emotions in their audience.
In other words, brand personality is how people perceive a brand based on how it looks, what it says, how it acts and all sorts of other qualities. So, when we talk about brand personality, it's about how the brand comes across to both existing and new customers.
Your brand has seven seconds to make a good first impression. And you may have heard the phrase, "The first impression is the last impression." So, to stay on the safe side, define your brand personality in a way that impresses people right from the start.
Have you ever felt that you have some affection and attraction to specific brands? If yes, don't worry — you're not the only one. But if you want to understand why you feel that way, you need to understand this psychology.
According to social psychologist Jennifer Aaker, the psychology of brand personality is divided into five dimensions: Sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, and ruggedness.
Let's understand what each of them communicates.
Honest, wholesome, cheerful, down-to-earth, warm.
Brands with these qualities reflect trustworthiness and reliability, making their customers feel safe. These brands always focus on keeping their promises and meeting customers' expectations. Brands like Cadbury, Amazon and Hallmark fall into this category.
Cadbury is an excellent example of the brand personality “Sincerity.” They provide some of the finest quality products in the chocolate industry. Furthermore, they use purple as their brand color that demonstrates luxury and helps their ideal customer perceive the quality of what is inside.
They focus on family, friendship, gifting, honor, generosity,and caregiving through their products.
Trendy, imaginative, spirited, daring, intrigued.
Brands like this create a lot of hype in the marketplace and never fail to excite their audience. Even if they go beyond customer expectations, they do it in a playful way. Think of Mountain Dew, BuzzFeed, Red Bull, Tesla or Nike.
Mountain Dew is one of the energetic brand personality examples. It has all the qualities that put it under the "Excitement" category. They always focus on the youth and athletes of the current time and encourage them to drink Dew and do adventurous things. The use of taglines like, “Dew or die,” or, “Put a Little Yahoo In Your Life,” demonstrates their imaginative brand personality traits.
Mountain Dew once collaborated with Warner Bros. Pictures’ film "The Dark Knight Rises" and released a limited-edition flavor, showing their daringness. And the best part is the Neon packaging that makes it a spirited brand.
Reliable, successful, intelligent.
Brands with these qualities are always the leading ones, such as Google, Microsoft, Volkswagen and Intel. Customers choose these brands because they believe they will get the job done.
A brand is considered competent when people rely on them. However, the brand should also be successful and intelligent. Microsoft has all the traits of a competent brand personality. The whopping product line of Microsoft includes search engines, browsers, smartphones, Xbox Series, operating systems and many more.
By offering Windows OS, Microsoft is also the leading brand in the operating system provider industry, and it almost dominates every brand in the market.
Moreover, on top of everything, the reason that makes Microsoft a competent brand is its acquisition strategy. The company has acquired some of the leading brands globally like Skype, Nokia, Hotmail and more.
Luxury, charming, high-class, timeless, glamour.
Sophistication as a brand personality combines superiority and luxury to let their customers show off an upper-class lifestyle.
Dolce & Gabbana is one of the world’s most popular luxury brands. They maintain their sophisticated brand personality by using effective communication and marketing strategies along with premium pricing.
They're well-known for their innovative design that creates a strong connection with their Mediterranean spirit. Thus, reflecting the "Timeless" trait of their brand personality. Furthermore, they focus on making their ideal customer feel high-class, charming, elegant and dynamic.
Adventurous, athletic, tough, outdoorsy.
These brands embody the outdoor lifestyle of their customers and make them feel connected to nature. They understand their customers are unafraid, tough, and willing to get dirty. Brands that come to mind are Jeep, Harley Davidson, Woodland and Yeti.
A perfect example of the "Ruggedness" brand personality is Woodland. A specialist in making outdoor and trek footwear, the brand reflects the outdoorsy and ready-to-adventure personality traits.
They use the color green, which represents nature, giving them the outdoorsy look they want. Furthermore, they use brown as one of their brand colors, which adds a sense of strength, reliability, security, and safety to their brand personality.
Now, you know why you feel attracted to some brands. They have certain personalities that attract us just like the way any other person’s characteristics do. And those characteristics are mentioned above.
So the next question you’ll be asking is: What is my brand personality? We’ll show you how to build a brand personality framework.
Defining your brand personality is a great way to build brand equity. However, defining brand personality doesn't always come naturally. You need to spend a bit of time and attention understanding your target audience before defining your brand personality.
So, let's walk step-by-step through the process of defining brand personality.
Whenever you feel connected to a brand, most of the time, it's because of its alignment to a brand archetype. But what is a brand archetype?
The characteristics of a human being reflect their core desires, which are divided into 12 archetypes. Here are the archetypes:
Archetypes are the personification of certain behaviors. It provides you a roadmap to understand your customers’ desires more accurately.
So the first step towards building a brand personality starts with understanding the target audience. The better you know your target audience, the easier the process will be. Start by segmenting your audience with their demographic, psychographic and behavioral qualities.
To learn more about the brand archetypes, check out this infographic detailing each one.
Now, align your target audience with one of the 12 brand archetypes. Which of these 12 archetypes do your ideal customers fall into?
The value you provide to your customers' life is the role of your brand. Identifying your brand role is crucial to determining the most suitable brand archetype for your brand personality.
You can be their:
Understand how your products or services affect your customers' lives to find out your brand role. You can do that in a few ways mentioned below:
Consider your brand to be a member of a specific community. What profession would your brand get in that community? How could your brand contribute to that community? Is your brand more of a leader in that community, or does it play a supporting role?
Here, agent means something that takes an active role or produces a unique effect. So, perceive how your brand influences your customers’ life and create a special effect.
Imagine your brand as a personal relationship in your customers’ lives. These relationships can be someone in their family, a friend or anyone else who plays a vital role in their lives.
Once you identify your brand role, align your brand with the characteristics of that particular role.
Simplify content creation
and brand management for your team
Make sure you have the answers to these questions before choosing an archetype for your brand:
Now, if you have all the answers to these questions, it is time to select the primary archetype for your brand.
Once you pinpoint your archetype, you can choose a secondary archetype to complement the primary one. (Think Enneagrams and other human personality quizzes — you typically have a primary and a secondary personality type.) This will help you add complementary personality traits to your brand that the audience is attracted to.
Though adding this complementary archetype is not mandatory, it can be a huge opportunity to add a further dimension to your brand personality.
Now that you've defined the archetype, create a mood board to visualize your brand personality. You still don't have a defined personality; you only know the characteristics and traits to display. You need to adopt beliefs, opinions, and attitudes to make your brand personality unique.
So, use the mood board to visualize your brand personality and feel it like a real person. You can use Visme to create your moodboard and visualize your brand personality by getting started with a template like the one blow.
Now you have all the human qualities for your brand except the language and tone of voice. Once you identify all the characteristics of your brand, you need a brand voice to support them.
Consider your brand guidelines, such as your brand colors, fonts, logo, and other marketing materials, while creating the mood board. Additionally, use the brand voice infographic template to get your job done efficiently.
When you're all done, align each of the characteristics, traits, opinions and brand voice. And that's it! You have defined your brand personality.
Knowing your brand personality is extremely important for making your brand stand out in the marketplace. You've just gone through a lengthy process to develop your brand character, but all your hard work will be in vain if you can't express it effectively.
This next section details everything you need to know about properly expressing your brand personality.
To set your brand positioning, it's crucial to convey your value proposition through brand personality. Since your brand message is communicated to your target audience, it is the easiest way to get your personality across.
Brand messaging starts from within your company. It's not just how your customers perceive your brand but also your employees. Your company culture, vision, and mission statement decide how your potential customers will experience your brand.
Customize your brand messaging by applying the personality traits to all your brand messaging components, such as the mission & vision statement, value proposition, slogans, voice and others.
If you're looking to describe your brand or craft compelling messaging, use Visme’s AI writer as a starting point. This tool can aid in creating ideas, attention-grabbing headlines, or persuasive copy. Better yet, you can ask the tool to adjust your tone so that the messaging is consistent with the brand's personality and values.
According to Forbes, brand storytelling is the future of marketing. They also claim that storytelling makes your brand 22 times more memorable than facts and figures.
A compelling brand story is not about your brand or you and your team. It's about whether your audience can see themselves in your brand. An effective brand story will always be in line with its audiences' lives.
So, you need to tell your audience the story they want to hear.
And now that you have two main characters for your brand story: Your audience and human buyer persona, storytelling will become a lot easier.
Now you can tell a compelling story to your audience using your brand personality.
You have aligned the language, voice, tone and personality traits of your brand. Now it's time that your personality reflects on the face of your brand, which is brand identity.
And how do you do that? A brand identity template includes your brand colors, fonts, logos, and other brand visual identity elements. So, applying all your brand's personality traits in these visual elements will be one of the most effective ways of expressing your brand personality.
Here are the elements of brand identity where you can apply your personality:
The most critical brand identity visual element is your logo. It's a powerful marketing tool that you can use to display your brand colors, fonts and, most importantly, your brand personality. Statistics show that your logo is the most recognizable brand identifier.
So, you should design your logo keeping in mind all the characteristics of your brand to reflect your brand personality perfectly.
Colors play a significant role in evoking different emotions in your customers. Each color leaves a certain impression on your customers. So, if you still don't have any brand colors, understand the color psychology to know which color will suit your brand personality and choose appropriate colors.
Get help from this color psychology infographic template.
The fonts you choose to convey your brand message or display any text from your brand can reflect your personality. If you already have brand fonts for your company, ensure they suit your brand personality.
Alternatively, if they don't, you need to reconsider your brand fonts that will reflect your brand personality. Here is a handy guide on the anatomy of typography where you can draw inspiration from. Collect all of your elements in a brand kit so you can keep your branding consistent across various marketing and design materials.
Some businesses overlook this critical aspect of branding and miss out on the most significant chunk of their marketing success. On the flip side, some companies nailed their brand personality and took their company to the next level.
This is why we've come up with a list of famous brand personalities to inspire you.
Despite being a technology company, Apple falls into the sophistication category of brand personality. Apple's personality traits are innovative, cool, unpredictable, stylish, friendly, casual and creative. People who love simplicity with innovation are the ideal customers for Apple.
Apple's core values come from the famous phrase by its founder Steve Jobs: "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."
They remain consistent in every touchpoint of its branding, from packaging to marketing. Now, Apple has become not only one of the most valuable brands but a lifestyle.
Tesla's brand personality is excitement and sophistication. People these days use brands as self-expressive statements. We want people to make judgments about us by our clothes, accessories, cars, and other things.
Driving a Tesla gives a tremendous amount of self-expressive benefit, just like using an Apple smartphone.
Apple and Tesla are widely regarded as having almost similar brand personalities. Both of these brands are undeniably linked with their leaders.
Tesla's CEO Elon Musk has the vision to change the world. So, Tesla shares the magician archetype. Also, the brand wants to crush all of its competitors, sharing the ruler archetype as well.
Nike has endorsed the finest athletes across various sports, displaying that their customers are excited, innovative, durable and cool. Thus, Nike's brand personality falls into the excitement category.
People around the world love Nike because of its personality traits. You'll hardly find a person in the world who doesn't like Nike's personality traits. Also, its famous slogan "Just Do It" relates to every single person on the planet at least once in their lifetime.
Due to their unique personality, Nike has achieved great brand loyalty and captured much of the market by making consumers opt for their products over their competitors.
Harley-Davidson's brand personality is ruggedness, suggesting that their bikes are powerful and unique. Customers with rebellious personalities connect with Harley-Davidson.
People get a combined sense of freedom and luxury by riding their motorcycles which you will not find anywhere else. Despite being expensive, Harley-Davidson bikes are made to fulfill customers' dreams.
They promote their motorcycles as mean and tough machines in all their marketing campaigns. Their logo and use of dynamic and bright colors helped them express their brand personality.
Rolex shares two different brand personalities at the same time: Competence and sophistication.
Rolex is widely known for producing the finest watches in the world. Hence, they score high on competence while being a sophisticated brand. Their ideal customers are the ones who belong to a corporate world and don't need anything flashy but something elegant and classic.
The brand allows its customers to use its watches to convey success to the world. They have solemn, stable, responsible, organized and professional personality traits.
From its brand colors and fonts to the name and logo, everything about Red Bull is energetic. No other brand does things the way Red Bull does to run and market their business.
The brand relates to two different types of customers — fun-loving people who need energy in their daily lives. The other one is a professional athlete who needs to exceed complex challenges in their lives.
You must have come across their famous tagline, "It gives you wings." They focus primarily on their brand rather than their products. To do that, they dabble in concerts, music festivals, extreme sports to take their marketing to the next level.
Amazon's brand personality is sincerity and competence.
Amazon offers a personal relationship with all of its products and services, making them one of the most trusted brands globally. Its personality traits include reliability, competence, sincerity and care.
The brand focuses on customer satisfaction and tell their customers exactly what to expect. Though not all their products are successful, CEO Jeff Bezos is not afraid of failures. This attitude of Bezos makes the brand more human to its customers.
Instead of focusing on what their competitors are doing, they have gone beyond their customers' expectations and developed innovative ideas and sincerity.
Tiffany's brand personality is pure sophistication — no doubt about that.
Tiffany & Co. has a sophisticated, charming, luxurious and elegant personality. These traits made them one of the most prestigious jewelry brands that women all over the world love.
Their potential customers aspire to have all Tiffany's personality traits, making their brand relatable and allowing them to sell their products at a very high price. This also gives their customers the upper-class lifestyle they want.
They use a specificshade of blue as their brand color (now coined "Tiffany blue"), which has helped them shape their brand and its personality. Tiffany uses this color through their social media, website and marketing materials, evoking a sense of desire amongst their target audience.
Coca-Cola's brand personality is a combination of sincerity and excitement. Their brand personality is displayed in their vibrant logo, brand colors, iconic slogans like "Delicious and Refreshing," "Always Coca-Cola," "Share A Coke," and many others.
Coca-Cola was started as a failing brain tonic until its new owner, Asa Candler, came up with this unique brand personality. Since 1880, the brand has been conveying sincerity through cheerful advertisements and excitement through its refreshing taste.
People love Coca-Cola because of the brand without even consuming the drink. When it comes to brand personality, you'll be hard-pressed to find one more iconic than Coca-Cola.
Starbucks' brand personality is sincerity. They deliver the taste of real coffee with honest and transparent advertising. All the employees in Starbucks focus on making strong connections with its customers, making Starbucks more than a standard coffee shop — it has become a community.
Besides providing the best products and services in the market, they provide a social status. They also offer membership cards that make customers feel like a part of a privileged group. There comes a little bit of sophistication in their brand personality.
Furthermore, their iconic marketing strategy, writing customer names on their cups, proves attention to detail. This makes Starbucks stand way ahead of its competitors.
Measuring brand personality is a process that helps you understand how customers perceive or feel about your brand. You can measure brand personality using these strategies:
Overall, measuring brand personality is a key aspect of your brand strategy. You need to collect data, analyze it and make strategic decisions based on the insights you’ve gained.
Brand personality refers to the human characteristics or traits that are attributed to a brand. It’s a reflection of the emotional and personal connection that a consumer has with a brand.
In contrast, brand values refer to the visual and tangible elements that can be seen or experienced. They mirror how your brand communicates through its tone of voice, core values, beliefs, and visual identity.
A brand should have a consistent personality that aligns with its values and messaging. However, a brand can have multiple personalities if it is targeting different audiences or has multiple product lines. In such cases, each personality should still be aligned with the overall brand identity and values.
Ultimately, the goal is to create a cohesive and memorable brand personality that resonates with customers and fosters long-term loyalty.
Brand personality is how a brand behaves, speaks and interacts with its customers, as well as how customers perceive the brand.
Brand values, on the other hand, are the core beliefs and principles that your brand stands for. These values guide a brand's actions, decisions and business strategy.
As we mentioned earlier, having a brand personality is a critical element of every brand—one that perfectly reflects your vision and mission statement, the products and services you provide, and your core values that make your customers choose you over your competitors.
Once you know your audience, aligning your brand with their characteristics is the best way to get started. So take enough time to create the right brand personality and ensure success.
And when it comes to creating marketing materials that help promote your personality and messaging, Visme's brand design tool can help you get started with your own bundle of branded templates.
Design visual brand experiences for your business whether you are a seasoned designer or a total novice.
Try Visme for free
About the Author
Raja Antony Mandal is a Content Writer at Visme. He can quickly adapt to different writing styles, possess strong research skills, and know SEO fundamentals. Raja wants to share valuable information with his audience by telling captivating stories in his articles. He wants to travel and party a lot on the weekends, but his guitar, drum set, and volleyball court don’t let him.