Fortifying Your Brand Personality: How to Stand Out in the Age of AI
How does a clear and concise brand personality encourage success?
When it comes to building sustainable success for your company, aligning and identifying your brand personality build the framework for strong company alignment, customer loyalty, and overall growth. Successfully defining your brand goes beyond choosing your brand’s fonts and color scheme, but dives much deeper into your differentiating values, personality, and identity. “You’ll only stand out so much on the basis of your visual content, logo or product features alone. At least 34% of consumers want to see posts highlighting the brand’s personality.” A clearly-defined brand personality guides the customer experience at every touchpoint. It ensures that customers have a consistent and cohesive experience with your brand—whether they choose to use your services, or simply interact with your website, engage with your customer support, and see your advertising. This alignment in your brand experience builds trust and, thus, loyalty, as customers know what to expect from your company and can rely on your brand. But your customers are not the only ones benefitting from a strong sense of brand identity—strong brand values and voice equate to stronger employee alignment, loyalty, and confidence and assurance in your company.
A clear sense of brand identity fosters growth and loyalty both internally, with your clients, and externally, with your employees and team.
A strong brand personality not only ensures a successful customer experience and growing retention rate, but successful employee alignment and increased retention. In fact, a recent LinkedIn study found that, “80% of talent leaders agree that employer brand has a significant impact on their ability to hire great talent.” In the same way that a customer feels a greater sense of loyalty towards a brand whose consistent values and identity they can rely on, employees need to feel the same. In fact, a study done by CareerArc found that 91% of prospective employees take into consideration the online reviews of past employees’ experience—“A strong brand doesn’t just attract talent, it also maintains it.”
When you define your brand personality, you establish a clear identity and set of values for your company. This clarity helps align your team by providing a shared understanding of what your brand represents and how it should be presented to the world. When employees feel empowered by a clear understanding of company values and identity, they can align their actions, behaviors, and decisions with the brand, ensuring consistency across the entire company and reducing decision fatigue by providing a benchmark for decision-making. This helps ensure that when perspective partners and customers approach any team member, at any level/position within your company, the messaging is clear and concise.
What is the value of strong branding in the age of AI-generated content?
While you might think that in an age defined by a rapid surge of AI-generated content (with no sign of slow down in sight), the value of brand personality would no longer be as relevant and valuable; however, that reasoning in and of itself is why defining your brand personality is now more important than ever. In a competitive marketplace, having a distinct brand personality allows you to differentiate your products or services by conveying a unique set of values that resonate with your target audience. While AI-generated content/branding is beneficial in its ability to create branding color schemes and content rapidly, solidifying your authentic brand voice, tone, and personality ensures you can compete with this mass production of AI-generated content. Solidifying your brand values, voice, and identity is critical to ensuring that your brand’s authenticity stands out amongst an oversaturated market of AI-generated content. AI may provide content at a rapid rate, but it’s flawed in its ability to create alignment amongst your internal team, and ensure authenticity in your brand personality and customer experience. Customers also tend to form emotional connections with brands that they can relate to on a personal level, which is a crafted experience that AI-generated content has yet to provide in the same capacity. These aspects of branding are more important now than ever before—“As more content is created using AI, human marketers will need to inject the brand’s unique voice to cut through the noise.” Differentiating your brand not only helps you attract and retain customers who are drawn to your brand's personality, but ensures that your customers remain loyal to your company even in the midst of an increasingly AI-centric industry.
Now, more than ever, the emphasis on defining your brand identity will help ensure your competitive edge in the age of AI.
In the age of (what feels like) an emerging AI takeover, it’s critical to evaluate your own brand. Defining what makes your brand unique, what makes your company stand out, is pivotal in building emotional connections among customers, fostering loyalty both internally and externally, facilitating successful targeted marketing efforts, and, ultimately, ensuring growth and success even in the age of AI.