Brand Personality Starts With Customer Evidence
A company can describe its brand as warm and dependable, write a cheerful welcome email, and still make a customer feel abandoned when a payment fails. The welcome message is easy to control. The customer’s impression comes from the whole encounter: what the error says, how quickly the company explains the problem, and whether the next step is clear. That gap is why “What is our brand personality?” is a more useful question than “Which adjectives sound good in our presentation?”
Brand personality is the set of human traits people associate with a brand. It describes a perception, not a character hidden inside a logo. A company may intend to be reassuring; its audience may experience its unclear prices as evasive. The practical job is to choose a few traits that serve the audience, then make those traits recognizable in what the company says and does. Jennifer Aaker’s original definition and account of how associations form include contact with people, products, prices, advertising, symbols, and places of sale. That breadth makes brand personality useful, but it also sets a limit: a clever line of copy cannot carry the whole impression.
Start with the impression people already have
The first distinction to make is between a desired personality and a perceived one. “We are approachable” is a choice made inside the company. “This brand feels approachable” is a judgment made by someone who has met it. Both are worth recording, but they answer different questions. The distance between them tells a team where its intended identity has not reached the customer.
Aaker’s research made this distinction tangible by asking people to rate brands on human traits, rather than treating a company’s own description as the answer. In the main study, 631 respondents rated a set of 37 brands against 114 traits; the resulting patterns were used to build a brand personality scale. Those numbers describe the study, not a sample size or questionnaire that every business must copy. They matter because the resulting traits were grounded in audience responses and in a particular set of brands, questions, and people. The study’s method gives a reason to ask customers what comes to mind before declaring that the company has achieved the trait it wants.
Consider a hypothetical bookkeeping app. Its team wants customers to experience it as dependable and approachable. The team might ask recent customers what words describe the app, what happened just before those words came to mind, and whether the feeling changed when they needed help. “Approachable” would mean more if customers point to a clear explanation of a failed bank connection than if staff merely prefer that word. If customers instead describe the app as polished but hard to understand, changing the headline alone misses the encounter that produced the judgment.
The same customer can also hold more than one impression. A playful interface and a careful explanation of a tax setting need not cancel each other out. The question is whether the combination makes sense for the decision the customer is making. In the bookkeeping example, clarity and dependable handling of errors probably deserve more weight than surprise or humor during a failed connection. That is an editorial judgment about a hypothetical service, not a claim that all financial products need the same personality.
Use the five dimensions as vocabulary, not a template
Aaker’s study grouped brand traits into five named dimensions: sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, and ruggedness. In the study, sincerity included descriptors such as honest and genuine; excitement included daring and imaginative; competence included reliable and efficient; sophistication included glamorous and charming; and ruggedness included tough and outdoorsy. These are patterns found in the research, not five virtues that every brand should display. The paper’s dimension table is most useful as a way to sharpen a vague conversation. If someone asks for “a stronger personality,” the dimensions prompt a better question: stronger in what direction?
The labels are broad. A customer can read a precise receipt as a sign of competence, while another may infer competence from a calm support response. A brand can also appear competent and sincere at once. For a business deciding how to act, “competence” still needs translation into something a customer can see. Which step will be simpler? Which promise will be easier to check? Which answer will arrive when something goes wrong? A trait becomes useful when it constrains a real choice.
I would usually choose a small set of compatible traits over an attempt to score highly on all five dimensions. In the hypothetical bookkeeping app, dependable and approachable create a coherent standard: show exact transaction status, explain unfamiliar terms, and say plainly when a connection has failed. A claim to be daring would demand a different reason for being there. It might suit an experimental feature, but it should not push a warning message into a tone that makes an unresolved payment sound trivial. The cost of the narrower choice is that some expressive ideas will be set aside. The benefit is a clearer basis for deciding which ideas belong.
There is a reason to avoid treating Aaker’s framework as a personality test for brands. Its scale came from particular research choices, including the brands and traits shown to respondents. In a separate study of mass-market brands, Caprara, Barbaranelli, and Guido found that personality descriptors could change meaning when applied to different brands. The lesson for a working team is modest but consequential: use a trait word to start a conversation, then ask what people in this market mean by it. A label imported from a slide or another category cannot settle that question.
Choose traits that the offer can carry
The most tempting personality words are often agreeable ones: authentic, bold, caring, premium. They do little work until a team names the audience, the situation, and the sacrifice implied by the choice. “Caring” might require patient help when an order is delayed. “Premium” might require a level of finish and service that the business cannot offer at its chosen price. If a trait requires behavior the company cannot sustain, selecting it creates a larger gap between promise and experience.
Start with the decision a customer is making. A first-time visitor deciding whether to trust a service may need understandable terms and visible limits. An existing customer facing an error may need a direct account of what is known and what to do next. The same audience can need different tones across those moments while still recognizing one brand. This is why personality should be connected to the customer’s circumstances instead of chosen from an adjective list in isolation.
Then look for repeated, observable cues. Aaker’s account allows brand associations to form through employees, endorsers, product attributes, name and symbols, advertising style, price, and distribution. The paper describes these as sources of perceived traits. A promise of simplicity is harder to believe if the pricing page is difficult to compare. A claim to be considerate is weaker if service replies avoid the customer’s actual question. The implication is practical: for every chosen trait, identify the product or service moment most likely to confirm it, and the moment most likely to contradict it.
For the hypothetical bookkeeping app, an approachable voice might explain a bank connection problem in ordinary language, but the product must also show the status of the connection and give a workable next step. A dependable brand might state when transactions were last imported instead of saying merely that everything is up to date. These are illustrative design choices, not reported features or measured outcomes. They show how the two traits can guide decisions beyond wording. If a proposed campaign cannot connect to experiences like these, the campaign may make the desired personality more visible without making it more believable.
This approach also reveals trade-offs. A brand that chooses restraint may decline a witty campaign line. A brand that chooses warmth may spend more editorial time making difficult notices understandable. A brand that chooses precision may have to acknowledge uncertainty instead of using a reassuring but vague phrase. None of these choices guarantees that customers will adopt the intended trait. Each makes the company’s actions more consistent with the impression it wants people to form.
Keep the voice recognizable and change the tone when the moment changes
Brand personality and brand voice are related, but they are not interchangeable. Personality is what people infer about the brand. Voice is the recurring way the brand communicates. Tone is how that voice responds to a particular moment. A team can write in a recognizable voice and still adjust its tone when a reader is worried, frustrated, or celebrating.
Mailchimp’s public content style guide makes this distinction concrete. It describes a largely stable voice that aims to be plainspoken, genuine, and clear, while its tone changes with the reader’s state of mind. The guide allows dry humor but puts clarity ahead of entertainment, especially when a joke would feel forced. That is a useful example of a company turning broad traits into writing choices; it is Mailchimp’s approach, not a universal script for every brand.
Apply that distinction to a payment failure. A brand can remain straightforward and warm in both a welcome note and an error message. The welcome note can be light. The error message should say what happened, what is affected, and what the customer can do. Reusing the welcome note’s cheerfulness in the error message would preserve surface style while ignoring the customer’s situation. A consistent personality does not require identical emotional temperature in every sentence.
A useful voice guide therefore needs more than a list of adjectives. It should show sample language for ordinary and difficult situations, explain the reason behind the choices, and give editors room to adapt. Mailchimp’s guidance on establishing voice and tone recommends defining the audience and communication goals, setting concrete standards, sharing examples with the team, and revisiting the guidance as the brand changes. For a small team, one page with a few real examples can be more useful than a polished manifesto that no one consults when a support reply is due.
The writing guide should also make room for a refusal: what would this brand avoid saying? A dependable brand might avoid promising that a problem is fixed before it is. An approachable brand might avoid a technical term when an ordinary explanation is accurate. This is where personality begins to shape the work rather than decorate it. The rule tells a writer what to do when the attractive line conflicts with the customer’s need.
Check what changed in the customer’s mind
Once a team has chosen traits and changed the encounters that express them, it needs to listen again. Ask people about the brand they experienced, not the brand described in the brief. Ask for a word, then ask for the moment that produced it. The second answer is often more useful: it identifies a service interaction, page, feature, or person that can be improved. A trait score by itself does not explain why someone gave it.
Keep comparisons fair. If one group describes a brand as “confident” and another as “pushy,” the difference may come from their needs, the situations they encountered, or what the word means to each group. It is too quick to average the two into a single verdict. Compare people who faced similar situations, use the same questions, and note when the encounters occurred. Aaker’s scale was built from particular respondents and selected traits; its method is a reminder that any score has a sample and a question behind it.
Look especially at the places where a desired trait has a costly opposite. If the goal is competence, inspect the moments when a customer needs an answer and the brand cannot yet give one. If the goal is sincerity, inspect claims whose limits are easy to hide. If the goal is excitement, inspect whether novelty makes a task more enjoyable or simply less predictable. The choice of trait determines which failures deserve attention first. That is more actionable than asking whether the brand has “enough personality.”
The final decision is whether to change the expression or change the promise. If people like the service but do not recognize a chosen trait, better examples, language, or visual cues may be enough. If people consistently describe an experience that conflicts with the trait, the product or service may need to change. And if the trait makes the company behave in ways its audience does not value, the trait itself deserves reconsideration. Brand personality works best as a disciplined description of an impression people can actually form, followed by choices that make the intended impression credible.