A Practical Brand Persona & Bottom-Line Worksheet
Branding is not just a logo and color palette. Nor is it the 47-page document someone sent you after you paid them a ton of money, only for it to be opened once and never looked at again. Your Brand is the experience people have when they encounter your brand in the wild, as a customer, and even as an employee.
Your Brand Persona is the personality, energy, quirks, language, humor, and perspective that make your company recognizable. It should show up everywhere: in your marketing copy, sales process, customer experience, and in the way people representing your company communicate with customers or clients and between themselves.
This worksheet puts your Brand to work to help people recognize you, remember you, trust you, choose you, and know exactly what to expect when they do. It also serves as a reminder that your Brand isn't decoration; it ties directly to your bottom line.
This will become the benchmark for what you believe is happening in your company. Parts 2 - 9 will help you get clear on the reality of what the customer experiences.
What is your ideal Customer Journey?
Finish these sentences:
If you can't answer those questions yet, that's useful information. You may be relying on your product or service to do all the branding work for you.
"Professional" is not a Brand Persona, neither is "friendly," "fun," "high-quality," or "authentic."
Those words aren't wrong, they're just so broad that they don't tell anyone what your business feels like.
When your company is performing at its absolute best, what are its characteristics?
Write the 3-5 most important characteristics (what makes you say "yep. That's us."):
Let's get more specific.
For instance, if you wrote "funny," what kind of funny (dry, witty, playful, irreverent, clever, goofy, punny)?
Get to the most ridiculously specific version of each of the five most important characteristics. Think about handing this list over to a random person and having them know exactly what to expect from interacting with your business from these 3-5 words or phrases.
Finish these thoughts:
Knowing what you are not is often just as useful as knowing what you are.
Your Brand Persona should be recognizable, intentional, and have pieces of you in it. Think of it like turning the volume up or down on who you are, not changing the radio station. The characteristics you choose are repeatable when hiring, but a costume will never feel genuine.
Look at the Brand Persona you've described above.
There is nothing wrong with having an aspirational element to your brand, but you do need to be able to deliver the experience you're promising.
Are you willing and able to consistently deliver this Brand Persona?
If NO:
The Customer Journey is what the customer or client experiences from the first time they hear about your business to the end of their relationship with your company.
Does it accurately represent the experience they're going to receive?
What happens when they:
What happens after the money changes hands?
Does that experience reinforce the reason they chose you?
If someone encountered your website, your social media, your sales process, and your customer experience separately, would they know those experiences came from the same company?
Your brand doesn't have to look identical everywhere, but it does need to feel like it belongs to the same company.
Look for places where your business says one thing but does another. This is where branding starts becoming a business problem.
What are the contradictions causing?
If you can put a dollar amount on it, do it. If you can't, estimate the time for your team, the sales lost, and/or opportunities that didn't materialize.
The uncomfortable reality is that there is probably another business that does what you do. Your "uniques" are what makes you stand out in the market and draws the right customers or clients to you.
You are not required to be everyone's favorite, and trying to appeal to everyone can water down the very thing that would have made the right customer choose you and keep coming back.
This is where I want you to stop thinking about branding as something you create and start thinking about it as something you use. Your Brand Persona should help you decide what belongs in your business and what doesn't.
Imagine you're choosing between two marketing campaigns.
Costs more, is faster, requires more graphic design time, but it doesn't really feel like your company.
Cheaper, slower, uses more of your social media manager's time, and it creates the experience you want customers to associate with your company.
Which one would you choose based on your Brand?
Notice that this doesn't automatically mean you always choose the expensive option "because branding." That's not a strategy. That's how you end up with a very pretty business that can't pay its bills. The question is always whether the decision you make creates the experience expected based on customer expectations.
What are you choosing:
Describe your options:
You can tell people what your brand is all day long, but that doesn't make it true. Your stories are the receipts.
If you're innovative, what have you actually done that proves it? If you're irreverent, what have you done that makes people laugh?
Let's put the stories to work.
Your brand should speak for itself through the customers and people working with you who have experiential proof.
It's time to connect everything above to the part of the business that keeps the lights on. Your Brand should make it easier for the right customers to recognize you, trust you, remember you, and choose you over and over again.
Where is my brand currently helping the business?
Where is my brand currently costing the business money?
Don't write "I'll feel better about my brand." Give yourself something you can actually observe and then celebrate.
Eventually, when you need other people to help you run the business, you can use your Brand Persona as a tool to make the best hires. Then, you can explain the reasoning behind your decisions, not just hand them a list of rules.
A brand that is recognizable, runs through the entire company, and is consistent for clients or customers is a Brand that other people can carry forward and create the next chapter themselves. This is the foundation of a company that can survive without its owner, which increases its value and staying power.
