Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hello and welcome to this Bitesized class where we will talk all about your brand personality. This series of Bitesized classes can be taken alongside my main branding series "Branding your creative Business". Those classes are more in depth and really help you work on every aspect of your brand. From choosing your brand name, right through to designing a logo, launching your brand, and your social media presence. Please do check them out as well. I'll include a link to them in the discussions panel. The purpose of these Bitesized classes are for you to keep thinking about your brand and business in fresh ways. For those who haven't taken any of my previous classes, my name is Faye Brown, and I'm a designer and animator based in the UK. I love all things: design, typography, and illustration. I also love teaching online, so thank you for checking out this class. I hope you find it useful for your brand and your business. In this class, we will be starting to think really hard about our brand personality and how we can make sure we convey this consistently across all areas of your business. Whether it's the tone of voice you use in an e-mail or a tweet, or making sure your visual brand elements like your logo tie in with the rest of your brand. By the end of this class, you should have a much better understanding of how to carry your brand personality forward throughout your business. There is a downloadable worksheet that you can print out which will help you with the class project. Your project will be to simply upload a paragraph describing a brand personality. The steps and exercises we do will help you achieve that. This paragraph can then be used for you to keep referring back to you and making sure you keep on track with whatever you do when you're doing something related to your brand. Who's ready to start? In the next video, we will be talking mostly about you.
2. Your personality vs your brand personality: Your personality versus your brand personality. A lot of you are probably taking this class from the position of running your own business, in which case your own personality will have a big impact on your brand personality. If you try to portray your brand as something completely different to your own personality, you'll find this a hard thing to keep up. You need to be able to speak to your potential clients or customers and come across naturally, so being yourself and being authentic is really really important here. For them to want to build relationships with you, we want to feel a genuine connection. Even if you think about the big brands like Virgin or Apple, you can see how the personalities of Richard Branson and Steve Jobs have carried through to the brand personality. If you're starting a business with a business partner or a few others, then you'll need to work out what shared personality traits you have that are important for you to bring into your brand. If one of you will be more the face of the business and maybe their personality will be the dominant factor. So what exactly is your brand personality? Your brand personality is what clients and customers can relate to, the way you communicate and behave, your attitude and how that translates free to you your visual identity, it's what distinguishes you from other people in a similar market or industry. Your brand personality doesn't have to appeal to everyone, what you want is it to appeal to the right people and people you want to build those lasting relationships with. Some of you will have loud outgoing personalities and some of you will be more reserved, some of you will be conservative and others will be quite outrageous. There's no right or wrong personality but quite often it's difficult to actually work out what our personalities are. A lot of us find it tricky to be introspective and describe ourselves. In the next video, we're going to do our first exercise to help you guys with that.
3. Exercise No.1: Brand analogies: Brand analogies. You've probably all heard of the question that people used to get asked in job interviews to throw perspective employees offer letter and to make them think a little bit differently. If you are a biscuit, what biscuit would you be? Why question? We can all laugh a little bit at this question, but actually it's a really useful way to start thinking about ourselves and our brands. When we can attach a trait or characteristic to a place or an object, it helps us think about our personalities in a more open way. Especially, if you are someone who finds it difficult to talk about yourself. I'm going to ask you five questions in a similar vein. Print your project worksheet out from the class resources and fill in as we go. We will then discuss your answers at the end. Throughout this class, I will use one of my businesses as an example, I have an Etsy shop selling printable items aimed at families. There's printable food packaging, wall art, and games among others. Giving you an example might help you when it comes to your own answers, but do realize that we will all have completely different businesses, so there are no wrong answers. Let's start off first exercise, pens at the ready. Just pause this video if you need more time on any of the questions. If your brand was a country, city or destination, where would it be and why? Maybe you're busy stylish city or a chilled out beach resort, maybe you're someone more exotic and spiritual, or maybe you're a mountain. If I'm miss printable, I'd go somewhere, probably to summer aimed at families may be Legoland, it great for kids with an emphasis on learning through play, but adults usually enjoy the whole legoth thing as well. I think that would be a fun destination for my brand. If you're brand was a shop or fashion label, which would it be and why? Are you exclusive and high-end or maybe you're a bit more budget friendly, are you practical? Maybe you're more cutting edge. For me from printable, I'd probably choose a shop like Gap pit simple, clean, stylish and practical. If your brand was a famous person bound or artist, who would it be? So a really good way to think about this is, who would be a good spokesperson for your brand? What is it about their personality that really strikes a code with you? So imagine if you ever had a TV advert, selling your products or services and you wanted a famous person to appear in it. Who would that be? If your brand was a drink, what would it be? Are you a warm cup of hot chocolate and espresso. Maybe you're a cocktail, maybe your bottomless spirit. I'd probably choose something like a fruit smoothie for Miss printable it's colorful, fun and tasty. The last question, I do want you to think about this. The first thing that comes to your mind care, and just write that down. If your brand was a color, what color would it be? The answer to this might help you with future ideas about how to visually brand your business. On your worksheet, you will see a few more options here there's animal, film and car. If you found this exercise helpful, carry on with this idea. My film, for instance, was the Incredibles from these printable can like a strong family relationship, humorous and bright with lots of energy. So what do you do with these answers? Hopefully, you'll see some crossover with your answers and some keywords which you can then pull out how he focused on. These can help you write your paragraph describing your brand personality. We will come back to this after the next exercise in the next video.
4. Exercise No.2: Scale: This next exercise is very simple, but can again help you think about words you can use through out your branding and also how to position yourself in the market. On the second page of your project worksheet, you will find a series of words and scales. Feel free to upload words to this list, but it should get you started. Not all of them will be relevant to each of your businesses, in which case, just leave them blank. On your sheet simply put a little mark on the scale as to why you think your brand fits on that scale. Here are my thoughts for misprinciples. Some of them I position myself in the middle and the ones that stick out to me are the ones where I've really related to one side more than the other, personable, fun, colorful, modern. These are the words I probably want to communicate in my brand personality and also the ones that would be important to me when creating my visual brand. Try this exercise and share your results, maybe just take a photo of your project sheets or scan it in and upload it into the project gallery. If you are still finding it hard to pin down words that describe your brand, why not tell us about your business in the project gallery and let's see if we can all start helping each other out a little bit here, or ask some friends. As I've said, it's often hard to open ourselves for something that is very important and personal to us, but I'm hoping these exercises have helped you think about your brand and different ways, but if you're still not sure, asking other people for their opinion can be very helpful. In the next video, we will talk through how to now go about writing your brand personality paragraph by creating everything we figured out so far from these exercises.
5. Writing your paragraph: Now we have two really useful exercises to start defining our personality a little bit more. I'm focusing this down to one paragraph. So why is this useful? Well, when you have a really good idea about how you want your brand be portrayed, this will help you communicate with your customers or clients, and figure out where to advertise or meet those kinds of people. Writing a brand personality paragraph can be used in a variety of ways. It can help you write an about section on a website, it can help you write a brand mission statement, or you might find you just use it just for yourself to keep checking in on, and making sure you're keeping in line with the personality of your brand. So if you really want your brand to come across as positive, happy, and forward thinking, maybe you will think twice before writing a negative post on Facebook, or Twitter, for example. Or if you want your brand to come across as professional and serious, you probably won't want to post a random picture, something silly on Instagram. So let's write that paragraph. Looking back on my answers for Miss Printables, the keywords that have come out from these exercises are, family, fun, colorful, clean, stylish, and personable. From that, I can write a simple strap line which I will use on my [inaudible] and elsewhere, something like sudden friendly principles for all the family. It's quite short and snappy. To build this more into a paragraph about the personality of the business, I'm going to try and avoid talking too much about the products, and just focus on the personality for this exercise, and a good way to do this is to think of your brand as a person. This is easier for me due to the name being Miss Printables, but hopefully you'll get the idea. Miss Printables is a fun-loving girl who love socializing and meeting new people. She loves to be surrounded by color and modern design. She loves seeing children's faces light up when she walks into a room with a new project up her sleeve. She is never happier when she surrounded by family and friends. So you don't need to personalize it to such an extent. You can write something more like this, Sports Shoe Brand is adventurous and bold, at the forefront of cutting edge technology and new innovation, with an emphasis on modern design and style. We dare you to take our sport shoes to new levels of extremes. In that short paragraph, you get a good understanding of what that brand is all about, and the type of people that it wants to attract. Once you've written your paragraph, please share it in the project gallery, and don't forget to keep coming back to this as you work on your brand and your business, just to make sure you're staying on track. Or maybe at some point you might find you need to update your brand personality paragraph, if your business is developed in a slightly different direction. Nothing we do is fixed, but it's good to have some markers in place to keep us on track.
6. 3 Top Tips: I just want to leave you with my three top tips when working out your brand personality. Tip one, be true to yourself and don't try to be something you or your products are not. You won't appeal to everyone, but that's okay. Finding a perfect client or customer will help you focus your brand and promotional materials in a much more effective way. Tip two, when you've figured out your brand personality, tried to carry that forward with all aspects of your brand and visual materials. For instance, the misprint Apple's logo, communicates that this is a friendly, fun, and accessible business aimed mostly at children. Tip three, nothing is set in stand. If you want to change things a little as your business progresses, that's okay, just try to be as consistent with your brand offering as you can. This will help build relationships and recognition. I hope you've enjoyed this first of my bite-sized brand in many classes. There will be more and thanks so much for enrolling. Please let me know if there are any classes that you would particularly like to see relating to branding. In the meantime, if he needs more direction with other parts of your brand, then please do check out the brand and your creative business series on here. Now they've been very helpful to a lot of people hopefully they can provide some guidance to you too. Don't forget to upload your paragraphs and project sheets into the project gallery. I tried to be very hands-on with my courses and give feedback as often as I can and I'll hopefully see you in another class soon.
Faye Brown, Faye Brown Designs
