Imagine you’re halfway through a road trip, stopping at a gas station to get a bottle of water. Your options: Liquid Death or Fiji. Which do you grab?
When companies sell similar products—like plain, still water—customers often choose based on brand personality. Do you identify with Liquid Death’s cheeky, heavy-metal personality, or Fiji’s calm, wellness-driven one?
But what is brand personality, and why does it matter? Explore brand personality examples and learn strategies to establish a brand personality that helps your business stand out from its competitors.
What is brand personality?
Brand personality is the set of human characteristics attributed to a company. For example, your brand personality traits could be laidback and lighthearted, just like a person. Brand personality is an element of branding, and a brand expresses its personality through both written (brand voice) and visual brand elements (typography, color palette).
For example, Liquid Death uses over-the-top language (“murder your thirst”) alongside skull motifs, gothic fonts, and a black and gold color palette to convey its edgy-yet-humorous brand identity. Fiji, on the other hand, invokes nature with its language (“Earth’s finest water”), images of water, and a blue color palette.
Companies also express brand personality through leadership, employees, and brand ambassadors. Businesses also hire branding professionals to cultivate their brand personalities.
The 5 dimensions of brand personality
Understanding brand personality is easier when you divide it into five key brand qualities or dimensions. As outlined in a 1997 paper by Stanford University professor Jennifer Aaker, these characteristics influence consumer preference and brand uniqueness.
In her research, Aaker found that consumers perceive the following five personality traits in brands:
1. Sincerity. Down-to-earth, honest, wholesome, cheerful.
2. Excitement. Daring, spirited, imaginative, up-to-date.
3. Competence. Reliable, intelligent, successful.
4. Sophistication. Upper class, charming.
5. Ruggedness. Outdoorsy, tough.
Your brand might align with one brand personality dimension, but don’t worry if it doesn’t. Before developing your brand’s personality, it’s important to understand how it will help your business.
Why your brand needs a personality
Mirroring human characteristics can help make your brand relatable and help your company stand out. It can also help you develop brand recognition. Ultimately, establishing a brand personality can benefit your business by helping you:
Connect with potential customers
Frequently, a brand’s personality mirrors that of its target audience. Taking this approach can help your target customers identify with your company.
For instance, the outerwear brand Finisterre provides a strong brand personality example by using an adventurous, rugged personality to relate to its audience of outdoor enthusiasts, particularly surfers. Its website features phrases like “Made for life where land ends” and “Gear for an inspired life around the sea.” These lines reflect Finisterre’s outdoorsy personality and target its ideal audience: hardy British surfers.
Stand out from the pack
A unique brand personality can help you establish your niche in a saturated marketplace. There might be other businesses selling similar products at similar prices, but you can lodge your brand in customers’ minds with a distinct personality.
Andrew Benin, founder of Graza olive oil, shared on Shopify Masters how hard it is to differentiate in a crowded ecommerce space. “Standing out is more difficult, more expensive, and full of risk,” says Andrew. While Andrew knew he had a great product, he invested the time and resources into developing a unique brand personality. Graza is friendly and approachable, unlike other olive brands that tend to be more sophisticated.
One way Graza expresses this friendly personality is through packaging: The company sells bright green bottles with lighthearted doodles. When you’re in the grocery store looking for olive oil, you’ll probably see a wall of dark green bottles with old-fashioned labels and packaging choices that help rival brands convey their sophistication. Graza’s bright green bottles with playful doodles stand out on the shelf.
Guide brand marketing decisions
When your brand imitates human qualities, it can be easier for your team members to conceptualize what your brand would and wouldn’t do. This can help guide your brand marketing strategy.
As you develop your messaging strategy, you can ask yourself, “Would someone with these traits write this?” As you decide which brand marketing initiatives to execute, you can ask yourself, “Would someone with these traits do this?”
For example, the canned food company Heyday Canning Co. infuses its playful brand personality into its marketing initiatives. Instead of a run-of-the-mill giveaway, the brand offered something memorable: a customized bean portrait—fun and unique to match their personality.
Now you’ve seen how a clear personality guides marketing, the next step is defining and implementing your own.
How to define and implement your brand personality
- Consider your company’s mission, vision, and values
- Identify your target audience
- Write a brand personality definition
- Create brand guidelines
Establishing a brand personality framework helps your business stay consistent, relatable, and memorable. Follow this five-step process to turn your company’s core values into its public-facing identity:
1. Consider your company’s mission, vision, and values
To craft an authentic brand personality, tap into your brand mission, vision, and values. Your brand’s personality will feel like a natural extension of your big-picture goals.
For Heyday Canning Co., the mission was to reinvigorate the sleepy canned foods aisle for today’s consumers. “From that emerged this consistent brand vibe,” cofounder Kat Kavner shared in an episode of Shopify Masters. “This new brand was going to be very joyful and vibrant and fun and vintage-y and retro in a way, but very forward-looking.”
2. Identify your target audience
Aligning your brand personality with your target audience can help you stand out and build brand loyalty. This is the route Omsom cofounders Vanessa and Kim Pham took when they launched their line of sauce pouches with Asian flavors.
“We really centered the first- and second-generation Asian American community at a time where many brands were overlooking this audience,” Omsom cofounder Vanessa Pham shared on an episode of Shopify Masters. “Even Asian food brands were speaking directly to a non-Asian consumer, saying things like, ‘Travel the world through our products’—which was very clearly not targeted toward Asian Americans.”
As Vietnamese-Americans, Vanessa and Kim drew on their own experiences, developing a brand personality that resonated broadly with Asian Americans. “Having lived a lifetime of being constrained by this model minority myth, we felt like embodying this noisy, loud, and proud energy was so true to us,” says Vanessa. “It’s the way that we wanted to show up in the world through our company.”
3. Write a brand personality definition
Define your brand’s personality using precise words, including what your brand is and isn’t. For example, Heyday’s brand personality might be a little retro, but it isn’t old-fashioned.
When clarifying what your brand is not, choose traits that may be desirable for other brands, but not yours. For example, Omsom uses the phrase real deal in its marketing materials, but not authentic. Honing in on these subtleties will help guide anyone who represents your brand.
“We had this foundation of knowing who we are and what we stood for and what we wanted to convey that we were then able to take to our design partner,” Kat says. Both Heyday and Omsom worked with branding agency Outline to build out their brands.
4. Create brand guidelines
Brand guidelines are a reference document with information on everything from your brand voice to typography to color palette, all shaped by your brand personality.
For example, when developing a color palette for Heyday, Outline’s creative director Ky Allport knew the colors had to be fun, vibrant, and a little retro.
“We also wanted these colors to feel like they could have come from the natural environment. So nothing that feels artificial,” Ky says. The result is a palette of colors like sungold orange, lemon yellow, beet red, and—of course—butter bean.
Brand guides are vital for maintaining brand consistency across customer touchpoints and marketing, which can become more difficult as you onboard new employees or hire external partners and freelancers. You might find that creating brand guidelines helps you fine-tune your brand personality.
“For a lot of people, it’s about getting all of their thoughts and ideas out, pointing at other brands they think are doing something good or bad, and using those data points to figure out what this brand’s stakes in the ground are,” Outline strategy director Margaret Pilarski says.
4 examples of successful brand personalities
Establishing a strong brand identity can be especially important if you run a small business and haven’t yet secured a solid market share in your industry. You can attract new customers to your company if they resonate with your brand personality.
Need inspiration? Here are four companies that used brand personality to advance their brand positioning, plus the tactics they use to convey it:
1. Liquid Death
Liquid Death has one of the most unique brand personalities in the direct-to-consumer beverage market. The brand sells bottled water with a hardcore edge—a surprising and memorable combination. The company conveys its edgy personality in its packaging and copywriting, which features a gothic font and the slogan “murder your thirst.” The company also uses social media to convey its edge.
“I love their Instagram page,” specialty coffee brand Kloo’s cofounder Claudia Snoh shared on Shopify Masters. “Most of the time, they actually don’t talk about the products they sell. They don’t talk about water; they don't talk about tea. They’ll just have a lot of random content on, for example, heavy metal and tattoos.”
Liquid Death often doesn’t directly promote its products in these posts, instead opting to solidify its brand personality—a choice that can pay off. “Too many brands right now focus their content on selling the product versus selling the brand,” says Claudia. “We’ve been focusing a lot on the latter, and it has worked really well for us.”
2. Graza
The olive oil brand Graza is known for its innovative squeeze bottles, which come in three versions that differ in their intended use: “Sizzle” is for low-temperature cooking, “Drizzle” is for finishing, and “Frizzle” is for cooking with high heat. Inside each bottle is high-quality, single-origin olive oil from Spain.
While Graza takes olive oil quality and proper cooking techniques seriously, the brand doesn’t take itself too seriously, opting for a lighthearted, approachable personality. “It feels friendly,” Graza founder Andrew Benin shared on Shopify Masters. “So even if you don’t know the people behind it, there’s a friendliness being emoted.”
Graza exudes that friendliness in its copywriting (hello, “Frizzle”) and packaging design, which features cartoonish illustrations.
3. Heyday Canning Co.
Heyday Canning Co. disrupted the canned goods market with flavor-packed products, like plant-based creamy coconut corn chowder and grilled cheese tomato soup. However, Heyday went beyond innovation: using brand storytelling, it infused personality into a traditionally dull category.
On an episode of Shopify Masters, Heyday cofounder Kat Kavner shared that she wanted the brand to feel personable and relaxed—“not like the cold, corporate vibe you might get from some other canned foods.”
“We want Heyday to feel like your friend that happens to be really good at cooking, who loves to invite you over for dinner and is cooking alongside you,” says Kat. “It’s very contrary to … canned food, which I feel is a very faceless, industrialized, cold commodity.”
Kat shares behind-the-scenes stories with humor and honesty, including posting a TikTok testing packaging by tossing it off her roof. “We try to just be playful and open … and give our community a peek behind the scenes,” says Kat. “Hopefully some of that friendly, personable transparency comes through.”
4. Ghia
As one of the first brands in the non-alcoholic spirits market, Ghia needed a bold and confident personality to attract consumers new to alcohol-free drinks.
Ghia founder Melanie Masarin crafted an aperitif inspired by her childhood summers on the French Mediterranean. Her drink is botanical and bitter—not sweet like other mocktail options—and breaks from traditional industry norms.
Melanie shares on an episode of Shopify Masters how she conveyed this distinction and brand personality through packaging. “We wanted a bottle that would fit beautifully on a bar cart but would also have a lot of personality. I think that’s part of our brand: We’ve had to be unapologetically loud because we didn’t want to be like a more tame version of an alcohol bottle.”
Ghia’s unique, ridged bottle highlights the beverage’s eye-catching deep red color, which is further highlighted by a contrasting blue label. Its bold personality also shines through bright brand colors, confident brand voice and playful calls to action, like, “We’re booze-free, but our emails are intoxicating.”
Brand personality FAQ
Can brand personality change over time?
A consistent brand personality helps build trust with consumers, so it’s important to develop a brand personality you can stick with. That said, established businesses may change their brand personality as part of a concerted rebrand effort.
How can a brand personality be communicated effectively?
Communicate your brand’s personality effectively by ensuring your marketing language, color scheme, fonts, graphics, and social media interactions all project the same personality traits. Align your employees and any external partners to make sure everyone shares the same understanding of your company’s personality, which can help ensure brand consistency.
What is the difference between brand personality and brand image?
Brand image refers to how the public perceives your business. Brand personality, on the other hand, refers to the set of human-like characteristics that define your company. A strong brand personality will help shape your brand image.
