Do you know what your brand’s personality is?

Your brand has a public persona, whether you know it or not. Its personality can be one you carefully crafted or it can be something that just grew organically without any nurturing. It may be something different to each of your constituencies or a solid persona for all to see. But your company or brand definitely has one.

We just created social media strategies for a couple of our clients. One of the first things we tell them is that you need to know what your brand personality is. It's important to speak in one voice, whether it's in marketing, pr, brochures, your website or internal memos. It's doubly important once you get into social media, because you need to make sure the voice you're speaking in is one your fans and followers will recognize as being yours.

How do you discover your brand personality? It can be a simple as looking at your communications and asking people, both within and without your company what they think it is and then building consensus. Or it can be as intricate as the brand analysis and corporate culture discovery practices Yaffe/Deutser performs for clients.

What do you do if you have multiple brands within a company? Usually each brand will have it's own distinct personality and then the unifying company has a personality that encompasses all its parts. Look at it as a family. If you are the Jones family, each member has their own personality, but yet they have parts of their personality that make them all Jones.

Let me illustrate by going through our family of brands. The Yaffe Group has five different family members, each with their own personality:

Yaffe/Deutser is very serious, professional and respectful. It has a quiet richness to it. This is a personality befitting what they do. They are a consulting firm that does some pretty heavy and intricate brand, research and corporate culture work. They have deep relationships with their clients and delve deep into some pretty serious analytics that can have a large impact on the businesses they work with. The current corporate culture project they're working on is profoundly changing the way that client does business on so many levels, most of them not even dealing with marketing or talking to the public.

Barrelhouse Creative is just the opposite. They are brash, flamboyant, quick with a quip. It has a tongue-in-cheek attitude. It's a hired gun who comes into town, makes some noise, tells its story, fixes the problem in a blaze of glory and rides on to the next town. This personality also fits the kind of work they do and the relationships they have. They are expected to come up with something flashy, something bright, something that will cause people to take notice. They are usually hired for project work and are only brought in when a problem needs to be taken care of. Once it's done they move on the the next one.

Yaffe Direct is the geek of the family. They are all about immersing themselves in data and finding patterns no one else sees. They're smart and quirky. Sometimes no one really understands what they do. But, everyone expects brilliance and results. They figure out equations and develop new technologies and gadgets that do wonderful things. Sort of Einstein meets Mr. Peabody. This fits in with what they do, too. They take client's data, find patterns, use new technology whether digital or new ways of using old tech and discover ways to get better results than the client was getting before.

Yaffe & Company is the cagey street fighter. They've been around the longest and know how to get things done when you're in a bind. They're the kind of company you want with you when you're fighting for your company's life. They've worked with all kinds of clients, but have a strong background in helping retailers wage the every day battle of gaining share and moving products. They have a bit of McGyver in them too. Always finding new ways to get a leg up on competition. It's out of this company that the newest disciplines, like digital marketing and social media, are coming.

The Yaffe Group is the parent for all these siblings. its personality is that of a kindly father figure with a twinkle in his eye. He is always handing out good sage advice. Often dotes on his kid's accomplishments. And isn't above pulling the old "pull my finger" trick on the newbies. If you look at the social media communications from The Yaffe Group, you'll see that combination of factors building the personality through what is said and how it's said on the Facebook and Twitter accounts.

So, what's your brand's personality? Leave a comment and let us know. Or if you need help figuring it out, give us a shout. One of us should be able to help!

Mike McClure, Top Gunslinger and Storyteller