Brand Personality: Why Should You Choose an Ad Agency You Want to Be BFFs With?

Remember back in Kindergarten when you and the kid ahead of you in line at the drinking fountain struck up a lifelong friendship based solely on you mutual love for pink Starbursts? Well, we’re not in Kindergarten anymore. We’re in business, in fact, so why should you concern yourself with something as touchy-feely as the things you have in common with your ad agency? You pay the ad agency, they make the stuff you ask for, you make a profit, and everyone goes home happy; right? Mmmm, you know it’s not that simple.

So, let’s start with the basics in your branding endeavors. According to Investopedia, brand personality encompasses all of those human characteristics and traits that accompany a brand’s name and image. Customers are more likely to buy in to your products and services if your brand’s personality resonates with their own personalities. For example, one of the many ways Apple is getting it right is that the company knows with exactness its own brand personality and has partnered with talented marketers to convey that personality accurately to consumers through the use of clean and sophisticated imagery, confident and competent messaging, and a building excitement for their cutting edge offerings. And if you were to ask Apple consumers which traits they attribute to themselves, you’ll probably happen to hear a lot of responses like “sophisticated,” “competent,” and “excited.”

We just touched upon a few of them, but each and every company’s brand personality is made up of these five key traits:

• Excitement
• Sincerity
• Ruggedness
• Competence
• Sophistication

Since no one brand is or should be operating at 100% capacity of the five traits listed above, it might actually be more helpful for this discussion to think of those five traits as five continuums and brand’s personality is operating somewhere along each of these:
• Excitement Repose
• Sincerity Opacity
• Ruggedness Refinement
• Competence Incompetence
• Sophistication Naivete

Determining where your brand’s personality falls on each of those five continuums is a task that can be undertaken internally if you employ a brand manager, or you can hire an outside firm with a strong background in brand research and auditing to nail down your company’s brand personality. Here at Greenroom Communications, we employ a brand audit or “voice exercise” as a fun and essential first step when working with new clients and it gets us to the heart of your brand’s personality and promise. And, frankly speaking, when your company communicates and keeps its promises, profits will increase.

So now, shifting back to the original question: once your company has nailed down its own brand personality, why is it so important to choose to work with an ad agency that shares similar personality traits to your own company?

The answer is authenticity. Authenticity, authenticity, authenticity. Today’s consumers turn down messaging they perceive as insincere, stuffy, sterile, and forced in favor of genuine, raw, and transparent messaging, even if that messaging touches upon some of the company’s imperfections and flaws. So let’s say your company’s brand audit uncovers that your brand’s personality (and that of your consumers) can be classified as highly rugged. You, as the marketing director of said rugged company, have been given the task of finding an ad agency to create a commercial campaign to launch your new rebrand. You saw a Mercedes commercial on TV that you loved – it was sleek, stylish, sophisticated, refined – but ok, it was not necessarily rugged. Nevertheless, ad agencies are versatile, right? Even though this particular one is known for sophistication, it can master rugged too, right? Just like your own brand’s personality has natural limitations, so does the brand personality of the ad agency you’ll be working with. Shock, I know. So, instead, you’ll be better off finding an agency that, itself, shares traits similar to yours and has a track record for working with other companies (not necessarily in your same field) that have similar traits to yours. First of all, when you partner with such an agency, you’ll find that collaborative vision and all around communication will be a joy. Who doesn’t love a joy? But most importantly, the messaging pieces the ad agency will create for you will come across authentically, and in turn will yield the results you’re looking for.

I’ll leave you with some questions you will want to ask your ad agency before you even sit down to your first concepts conference call:

1. Does your ad agency have a demo reel so I can get a feel for the general look, style, and personality of the advertising you create?
2. How would you describe the excitement level of your ad agency’s internal culture?
3. What are your thoughts on conveying our brand as is, flaws and all?
4. Are the typical clients you work with more rugged or more refined?
5. What is your ad agency’s expected timelines and workflow so I can compare them to those of our company’s?

So, here’s to striking up that lifelong friendship, or amazing working relationship anyway, with your chosen ad agency!

By Sonja Ciotti, Graphic Designer & Marketing Guru