The brand personality definition is the collective impression that an organization (or even individual) makes on its audience. Every brand has a personality, regardless of whether or not it’s planned and managed. You can have a rugged brand personality, or various brand personality traits that make up who and what your brand is. Logos, social media pages, copy, and design—it all comes together to paint a picture. With the right strategies, that picture can be used to attract customers, support growth, and increase profitability through the right brand messaging.

Meet with your team and brainstorm about who your brand would be if it were a person by taking into account consumer behavior, marketing research, and the target audience. A brand personality example could be that your brand is edgy with tongue-in-cheek humor. Or maybe is it built to fit in with trendsetters and cool kids, does it have a certain ruggedness to it, or is it sophisticated and refined, better suited to the upper echelon of society?

With an image in mind, how to define your brand personality will start to become clear and you will soon be able to see the visual identity of your brand. Using a list of descriptors as a sort of litmus test, determine as a group whether your brand is or is not that thing: aggressive, elegant, serious, subtle, basic, futuristic. You might even find yourselves torn on some words—that provides useful insight, too.

There is no one way to write a branding personality outline—it’s an exercise that necessarily morphs to fit the needs of the organization performing it.

Typical examples of brand personality include a list of adjectives that do apply to the brand and another list of ones that don’t. From there, you could even take it a step further with exact language and design guidance (“Always use contractions in copy to maintain a casual feel” or “Use only approved brand colors in packaging and digital content design”).