Your brand is more than just your colors and logo. That missing piece? That’s your brand character. No, we don’t mean the brand mascot like Ronald McDonald or the Michelin man. But the real essence of your brand, the one that’s a little harder to grasp than the visuals or a figurine.
What’s brand character?
Your brand character is the non-visual part of your brand identity. It’s the essence of your branding that makes it truly yours and unique.
Explaining it would be like describing a person without mentioning anything about their physical appearance. Its three main components are the brand personality, tone of voice, and unique selling point.
Brand personality
Your brand personality is exactly as it sounds. If your brand was a person, what would they be like? The same way you’d describe the personality of a friend, you could do it for your brand. Think of the impression you want to make when you interact with people as your business, and the characteristics you’d like to embody.
Tone of Voice
The tone of voice is the “how you sound” part. What kinds of words you use, whether you’re okay with slang or jargon, your emojis, and all that. When you’re not face-to-face, your words do all the talking, so you need to make them count. That means figuring all these rules out for yourself and sticking to them whenever you write or speak.
Unique selling point
Your unique selling point or USP is essentially what makes you different from all your competitors. Your secret sauce, if you will. If a client asks why they should hire you and not that other person, this is what you’d say. Many confuse it with their main tagline, but it’s not that. Its purpose is not to sound catchy, but to highlight your uniqueness.
Honorable mentions
A few other things that are not necessarily part of your character but can influence them are your brand mission and vision. It’s your purpose and approach, so what you’re doing and how to reach your goals, and where you aspire to be professionally in the long run.
How do you define your brand character?
Cool cool, so it’s the essence and personality of your brand. But how do you figure out what it should be like? Because as a business, it might not be exactly the same as your character in your personal life. You have a few different options here.
Expensive but easy: hire a brand strategist or branding agency
If budget is not a problem and you don’t mind dropping a couple of hundred (or thousand) dollars, you can just hire a brand strategist or an agency. They’ll have a few consultations with you and craft the perfect brand character to match you and your business goals.
The lengthy DIY: research, learn, and try it yourself
With not much budget but loads of time and motivation, you can of course, research and try to do it all yourself. Unfortunately, it’s not really something you could learn in a day—more like something people take multiple semesters to study. Then multiple years to hone. But with dedication, research, and some practice, you could definitely give it a go.
If you go this route, try to find a branding expert to go over the end results with you. Just to make sure they fit.
Fun and free: Copyfolio’s brand character quizzes
If you want the best of both worlds with a quick, easy, and free solution, we have a real gem for you. The best way to define your brand character is with Copyfolio’s brand character quizzes.
With a set of three quizzes, you can figure out all aspects of your brand character within just 10 minutes.
- You start with your brand personality quiz, which will give you the core traits that best describe it, alongside your strengths.
- Then you move on to defining your tone of voice. This’ll help you find the right words both in writing and in videos.
- Lastly, your USP. Building on your personality and ToV, with a few more questions, you can find your secret sauce that makes you truly stand out.
You’ll get them back on handy little stickies that live on your branding page, so you can come back and refer to them anytime.
Sounds fun? Head over to Copyfolio and give it a try!
How do you use your brand character in practice?
You got it all figured out, yay! But now what?
How do you actually put all those characteristics into place? Let’s see how, both for your already existing content and any new piece you’re about to create.
Revise your static content
You can do this two ways: manually or with a little machine help. For the former, open your brand character results on one side, and your content on the other. Read through your content section-by-section, whether it’s a page on your website or a post on social media.
After each section, ask yourself: does this match my brand character? Would someone with this personality and tone say it like this? If the answer is no, then rewrite and adjust until it feels authentic to your new personal brand.
If you want to make it faster, you can feed all your brand character results to ChatGPT, paste pieces of your content, and ask it to check for a match. It can help you adjust your copy, though you’ll most likely still have to read through and make some edits. But the more you do it, the more it should get the hang of your tone and preferences.
Or if you’re editing your website content made with Copyfolio, you can simply use the built-in writing assistant. Apart from the basic things like shortening your text or fixing your grammar mistakes, it can also apply your tone of voice with a single click. You can then insert it below your original text to compare and edit, or simply replace it—and you’re done!
Consider it for all new posts
Applying it to all new posts and pages is a similar thing.
We recommend you read through all your brand character results first. Try to imagine a real person with your brand personality traits and strengths, and think about how someone with your brand voice might speak. With that in mind, write your page, script, or post matching it as closely as possible.
As you write, run back through it after every few paragraphs, and double-check if it really is on-brand.
Similarly to existing posts, you can of course always ask for some help: from ChatGPT, Copyfolio’s built-in assistant, or even a brand consultant, if you know any.
Whichever way you decide to do it, don’t be afraid to spend a little time making sure your content is always on-brand. A consistent online presence can have a bigger impact on your career and on getting new clients than you’d imagine.
