At the core of any legendary company is a committed brand personality seeping into the customer experience at every turn. This maxim is especially sacred in the era of digitally native Direct-to-Consumer brands that live and die by consumer opinion, without the cushioning of traditional distribution advantages. To thrive in the online D2C space, companies must overcome novel retail hurdles, such as conveying an engaging, humanized experience through a disembodied e-commerce platform. Fundamental to creating an appealing, digitally native customer experience is a brand personality that permeates all aspects of the online experience and establishes emotional connection throughout.
Well-executed brand personality and humanized customer journeys return material economic benefits in the age of e-commerce. Moreover, customers increasingly demand a personalized and rapid experience, especially when buying complex products like insurance coverages. Forrester, in collaboration with Braze, found that companies that invested heavily in humanizing customer-brand interactions reaped benefits, posting 26% greater average purchase size, 18% greater customer loyalty, and 18% greater profitability per good sold. Additionally, companies that invest more in humanizing their brand see disproportionately greater returns than those with less investment. Studying customer behavior, Forrester found that customers were 1.7x more likely to purchase from a brand that emphasizes human connection and 1.9x more likely to recommend the brand to others.
Implementing an effective brand personality requires a deep understanding of your audience. For many consumers, brand personality exists as a vehicle to perpetuate their own self-image, with brand loyalty viewed as an extension of self-expression. However, customers shop with their own personal brand in mind and support stores that are aligned with their own concept of self, either in reality or aspirationally. Congruency between a customer’s personality and a company’s personality leads to stronger brand and product affinity over time. Establishing the right brand personality to appeal to your audience is clearly of vital importance.
The question remains, how do the most effective digital platforms determine their brand personality, and how do they measure success? Surely serendipity is not the answer. Successful brands study their target audience with extreme care, understanding the values and personality traits that render a psychological fit between company and consumer. Not an exercise to be taken lightly, crafting a winning brand personality requires resources for market research and uncommon skill in constructing an appealing and complementary fit.
Developing and executing a brand personality is a costly, but necessary exercise. Pinpoint helps both digitally native and well-established business with this process through our OnPoint data enrichment and analytics platform. Ethnographic approaches and focus groups take months and are costly, and then are difficult to activate at scale. Now, Pinpoint can help you enrich the great majority of your consumer records, providing accurate, big-data-driven analytics at a fraction of the cost and time. Moreover, our Thinkalike analytics are actionable at scale — across 260 million US adults.
For more information, reach out to schedule a free consultation and demo.