Brand Persona and Buyer Persona: Differences and How to Develop Each One
Do you know the difference between brand persona and buyer persona?
Learn in this post how to differentiate the two concepts and how to develop them for your brand.
What Is the Difference Between Brand Persona and Buyer Persona?
Brand Persona and Buyer Persona are two widely used concepts in the world of marketing, communication, and advertising.
But they can cause confusion…
Are they synonyms? Are they tools that serve the same purpose?
The truth is, in short, the Brand Persona is the personified representation of a company’s values. It defines how the brand positions itself and communicates in the market.
On the other hand, the Buyer Persona is the fictional representation of your brand’s ideal customers. It represents the audience that this communication should target.
Both are connected by being humanized representations and by assisting the work of internal teams.
Next, we’ll dive into the details of each concept and how you can apply them to your company.
Read more: ICP, Persona, and Target Audience: Don’t Confuse These 3 Concepts
What Is Brand Persona?
In more detail, the Brand Persona is the personification of a brand’s characteristics, personality, and language.
This is a branding tool used to guide the tone of voice and the representation of the company’s ideals in communication and interaction with the public.
Creating a strong brand identity is a way to boost its representation in the market.
It’s also a way to enhance the brand’s image in the eyes of the public, attract new business opportunities, and improve sales results.
Why Is It Important to Create a Brand Persona?
This tool is created to guide teams that work with content production, communication, marketing, and sales for the brand, making it easier to understand and maintain the same tone of voice and personality across all materials.
With a well-defined and well-applied Brand Persona, the brand creates a strong identity and can thus connect with its intended audience, who identify with the brand through its challenges, goals, and purposes.
How to Develop a Brand Persona in 9 Steps
With the Brand Persona, you can apply the defined personality, reinforce characteristics you want the public to perceive, and even train employees, the sales team, and customer service to create a standard in customer interactions.
So, let’s go step by step to create it:
1. Establish the Brand’s Pillars
What are the most important values for your brand?
These are the brand pillars, which guide all the actions carried out by the company.
Make a list of these keywords and move on to the next step.
Check out: Value Proposition Canvas – What It Is and How to Create Yours
2. Define the Brand’s Essence
What would you say defines your brand?
What words do you want your audience to associate with your brand?
This is its essence.
Read also: 200 Names for Marketing Agencies [Original Ideas]
3. Brand Promise
As the name suggests, the brand promise is the agreement made between the company and the consumer during the exchange that happens when a purchase is made.
What does your company deliver with the product or service it sells?
To define the brand promise, think about the benefits and the positive impact you want to have on customers’ lives, your community, and the world.
Typically, the brand promise follows this structure:
Promise = We promise (a verb) + (through something) + (to offer a specific result).
4. Determine Your Mission
The brand’s mission is that greater goal for its existence, beyond sales and profit.
This mission guides all the company’s efforts, not just in marketing and sales, but across all departments involved in the operation.
5. Conduct an Internal Analysis
Now that you have these crucial points in hand, look inside your company.
Do the actions, organizational culture, and results align with the definitions made so far?
Consumers want to find transparency, honesty, and consistency in brands.
6. Listen to What Your Customers Have to Say
During the process of building your Brand Persona, listen to who you intend to impact: your audience.
Conduct surveys with customers to identify how they view your brand, whether they believe the proposed profile matches reality, if they identify with the persona created, and if the communication is effective.
Read also: [Free Template] How to Make a Digital Marketing Proposal?
7. Build Your Brand’s Personality Traits
After internally and externally validating the progress made so far, it’s time to truly personify your brand.
This means creating a character that will embody and represent everything you want.
One commonly used tool for this is brand archetypes.
This tool originates from psychiatrist and psychotherapist Carl Jung’s archetype theory, which describes 12 personality types present in heritage and the collective unconscious.
Brand archetypes are sets of patterns used to define details about the brand’s personality and assign characteristics that convey the brand’s values and purposes, reinforcing the image it wants to project to the public.
You can learn everything about this branding tool here: “Brand Archetypes: Discover the 12 Types and Find Yours.”
8. Evaluate the Relationship Between the Brand and the Consumer
The brand’s profile and its consumer are connected.
After all, as we mentioned, the customer identifies with the Brand Persona, and that’s one of the many uses it serves.
So, assess what common traits exist between these two sides and emphasize these points in your Brand Persona’s communication.
9. Put Your Brand Persona in Writing
At this point, you have all the information you need to create the complete profile of your Brand Persona.
It may or may not become a character featured in your communication, or perhaps a company spokesperson, such as the CEO, embodies this profile in the brand’s communications.
But remember, these are just resources that use the Brand Persona.
In practice, the tool should be a complete document, with the profile, characteristics, tone of voice… and it should be directed to all professionals who communicate on behalf of the brand.
Include in the complete profile a name, age, occupation, photo, interests, personality type, etc.
Examples of Brand Persona
We’ve compiled some examples of Brand Persona that we notice through the communication of various brands:
Starbucks
Starbucks is another company with a very strong brand identity and undoubtedly a well-built Brand Persona.
Besides being a coffee shop, Starbucks seeks to deliver unique, daily moments worth celebrating for consumers.
Other traits we notice include a focus on personalized service, convenience, and comfort.
Disney
When we talk about Disney, a certain image probably comes to mind.
And it’s likely a fun, family-oriented, magical image.
Did we get it right?
This profile is part of Disney’s Brand Persona, which stands out for having ideas and actions that are out of the ordinary, creative and playful, fulfilling dreams and creating magical, unique, and special moments.
You might also like: 8 Types of Narratives and Storytelling Examples for Sales
Coca-Cola
In the same vein as Nubank, Coca-Cola doesn’t have a character, but rather an idea. This time, we’re talking about happiness
Notice how in all the commercials and campaigns, the brand is associated with happy, joyful, and inspiring moments, as if it’s telling us: with Coca-Cola, everything gets better, and we’re present during the best moments.
Precautions when Creating a Brand Persona
Just because you’ve built an ideal brand persona for your business doesn’t mean it will be perceived the same way by the market. Therefore, it’s important to pay close attention to the public’s perception.
To do this, before the creation process, start with the current perception the market has of your brand. Then, define a strategy to gradually align that perception with how you’d like your brand to be seen.
If you’re unsure how to begin, follow these first three questions:
- What problem does your company (or you) solve?
- Why did you become our customer instead of choosing our competitors?
- Would you recommend us as a supplier to another company?
What is a Buyer Persona?
The concept of Buyer Persona is related to a fictional representation of your ideal consumer, based on research and data, which helps to understand how each type of audience you wish to reach behaves and consumes.
The Buyer Persona primarily guides marketing, communication, and sales efforts.
Why is it Important to Create a Buyer Persona?
When you create a persona, you help the company and the marketing department understand how to position and communicate with potential consumers at any stage of the buying journey.
Moreover, personas direct other areas, experiments, and improvements within the company by adding a more realistic layer to discussions.
By defining all the persona’s characteristics, it becomes possible to understand and prioritize new features, products, and services, improve the website’s content, enhance user experience, determine offers, and produce targeted content that appeals to all materials developed.
How to Create a Buyer Persona in just 6 Steps
When creating your Buyer Personas (yes, you can have more than one!), keep in mind that combining different practices will result in a more accurate view of who your ideal customer truly is and their behaviors, pain points, and desires.
Check out our tips to build your Buyer Personas now:
1. Gather Data and Information from Customers, Prospects, and the Market
The first step in building a persona is research.
You can collect information and data from customers who already engage with your brand, from your prospects and leads, and also gather market data, particularly from your area of expertise.
Be creative in collecting, analyzing, and unifying the data that will lead to the profile representing your audience.
Remember that the profiles should include information such as:
- Demographic characteristics
- Interests
- Pain points and challenges
- Consumer behavior
- Goals
It’s also worth including explanations of how your product or solution will make a difference in the consumer’s daily life.
2. Conduct Interviews to Confirm your Hypotheses
A great way to confirm the data and hypotheses raised in the previous step is to actually reach out to your closest consumers by conducting surveys and interviews.
Select those who best match your idea of a persona, prepare an interview guide, and make the approach.
🔎 Read also: 15 Exercises to Overcome Creative Block Now
3. Research some Buyer Persona Templates
The information in your Buyer Persona profile needs to be standardized and accessible to all teams that will use it.
After all, this will be the guide for creating all of your brand’s actions and materials.
So, before putting the profile on paper, search for templates to choose one that you like or to guide the creation of your own template that will be used.
4. Start Creating your Persona’s Profile
With the chosen or created template, you can begin filling in the fields.
Always remember to consider the research and data collected, as creating a persona based on “gut feeling” can end up leading your strategy in the wrong direction.
5. Include Demographic Information
Gender, age, profession, place of residence…
These are some of the data that form the profile, based on the insights gathered.
Analyze the data that appeared most frequently in your research to construct this profile.
6. Also Include Motivations, Challenges, Goals, and Sales Objections
This is what will truly guide the communication, strategies, and actions that will hit the mark with the audience you want to reach.
Knowing your persona’s reality and how your solution can help them is the final step to completing the profile you’re building.
Buyer Persona Interview Questions
Remember how we said that interviewing customers and leads is one of the main ways to gather the information you need to create your Buyer Persona?
Here are some questions that might be useful:
Read also: 6 Examples of Briefing for Free Download
Questions related to occupation:
- What is your job title?
- What are the main activities you perform?
- What does a typical workday look like for you?
- What skills are necessary for your role?
- What challenges do you face at work?
Questions Related to the Company:
- What company do you work for?
- How many employees does your company have?
Questions Related to Goals:
- In your life/home/family/work, what do you feel responsible for?
- What does success mean to you?
Questions Related to Challenges:
- What is the biggest challenge you face today?
- What would you say are your main challenges?
Personal Questions:
- How old are you?
- What’s your relationship status?
- Do you have children? How many? What’s their age? Do they live with you?
- Where do you live?
- What’s your level of education?
- What did you study?
Questions related to consuming information:
- How do you stay informed?
- What websites or blogs do you visit?
- Do you like receiving brand emails?
- Which social media platforms do you use?
Questions related to purchasing preferences:
- Through which channels do you prefer to purchase? (physical store, consultant, online store, social media, WhatsApp)
- How do you prefer to interact with salespeople? (phone call, email, social media, WhatsApp)
- Can you tell me more about your last purchase?
The “why” question
All questions can be followed by this additional one: why?
This question helps us understand the motivations behind each choice and can provide interesting insights for the research.
Common Mistakes when Building Buyer Personas
The main mistakes in building buyer personas are quite similar to those made when creating traditional personas.
We’re talking about not understanding the difference between a target audience and a persona; relying on assumptions, which often don’t match reality; struggling to strike a balance between making the persona too broad or too niche; and conducting insufficient research—an essential step in developing your Buyer Persona.
Examples of Buyer Personas
Check out some examples and templates that can help in building your Buyer Persona.
But remember: your Buyer Personas are unique—and you need to discover them!
MailChimp
Personas from MailChimp, one of the largest global companies specializing in email marketing and automation.
Bleez
Persona from Bleez, a platform for creating online stores.
RockContent
One of the personas from RockContent, a company specializing in online content production.
Why not Dive Deeper into the Topic?
Well, after this complete article, we’ve seen that Brand Persona and Buyer Persona are crucial topics for your business.
I hope it helped you develop your own!
Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to check out our 14 day trial – no credit card required.
