Consumers today have more power than ever before in influencing who they want their brands to be and what they want them to represent. This article explores the concept of brand personas and the benefits of accurately representing consumers on social media platforms.

What is a Brand Persona?

Brand personas, like user personas, are fictional representatives of the existing and potential consumers of a brand. They are a compilation of traits, including personality traits, attitudes, and personal values. (Dion et al, 2016) Popular marketing strategies in recent years have seen brands create their own brand personas. Additionally, they have migrated their existing personas to social media platforms in hopes to reach more consumers.

By merging brand personas and social media together, brands can better understand their target markets. This enables them to create personas for their ideal customer. The most successful brand personas are those that are co-created by both the brands and their consumers, as these personas are more likely to accurately represent the brands’ consumers. Accurate brand personas are highly useful in marketing campaigns as they target consumers effectively and influence with ease.

But Who Am I?

Before brands can curate their ideal customer into eye-catching pictures and digestible social media posts, they must understand their consumer. To understand the consumer, they must first understand themselves. Brands can unlock success in their marketing endeavors by understanding who their ideal customer perceives themselves to be based on their own internal evaluation. Introducing, the self-concept, a theory that answers an individual’s question of ‘who am I?’ The perception of who one is, is made up of a combination of personal traits, such as personality type and relationships with family, friends, and societal groups.

Consumers experience various levels of self as they navigate different social roles, and their perceptions change throughout life. Brands that understand who their consumers think they are, and who they want to be, can create personas based on these perceptions, enabling them to target the market more successfully.

What Does Success Look Like?

Successful brand personas are the result of businesses truly understanding their target market. (Schwager et al, 2007) The better a brand understands their consumer, the better they will be at creating accurate and appealing personas. By creating the right personas, consumers can connect with brands on a more meaningful level.

Successful brand personas are those that consumers identify with.

Brands can learn from the successful personas created by clothing stores like Hollister, Bershka, and Victoria’s Secret. These companies are great examples of brands who understand their target market and who they want to be and capture their consumers accurately. Before the success of social media, the personas of these brands were portrayed by their attractive employees wearing the merchandise, and the cult followings of teenagers who desperately bought into the personas in the hopes of achieving the same desirable good looks of the brands’ employees. Male Hollister models were even deployed to stand shirtless outside stores in an attempt to attract consumers.

Brand Personas and Social Media Today

Due to the rise of social media, brands like Hollister and Victoria’s Secret may have already experienced their peak. Whilst the brands remain well-known and globally recognised, they don’t enjoy the notoriety they once did. This could be due to a failure to successfully migrate their persona to online platforms. However, where the well-known giants of the past have failed, the new and emerging brands of today have succeeded.

A glance at Bershka’s Instagram page sees stylish teenagers advertising clothing in a laid-back and ‘cool’ manner. From a quick look at their page, it is evident that Bershka understands their ideal consumer. Their consumers are slinky teenagers desiring bold and confident clothes. Bershka’s bright colours and various clothing fits meet the personas of their consumers. Translating these personas to platforms like Instagram is attractive and in-touch with their target market.

Vsco Who and E-What?

As the internet and social media have evolved, we have seen a shift in dynamics. Brands represent themselves and their brand personas online through various social media platforms. Additionally, emerging personas are being created on social media platforms. Consumers are now the greatest co-creators that brands could ever hope for. They are telling brands exactly who they are and who they want their brand to be. As a result, much of the guesswork in creating marketing campaigns is removed with marketers easily accessing key information.

Consumers today have more power than ever before. They influence who they want their brands to be and what they want them to represent.

_{Vsco Persona}

Take for example the popular app, Vsco. With humble beginnings as a photography app, similar to Instagram but without the ‘likes’, the app has now become its own culture, giving way to a whole new persona, known as ‘Vsco girls’. The persona sees styles of the 90s and 00s merging together to create a desirable persona for today’s young adults. In fact, brands and products have shot to popularity, simply for being associated with the aesthetic and persona, for example, Hydro Flasks, Kanken, Crocs, Birkenstock, Brandy Melville, Levi, and Polaroid.

Consumers identifying with brand personas are more likely to interact with and support the brand.

_{Tik Tok Personas}

The social media personas do not stop there! Likewise to Vsco girls, ‘E-girls’ and ‘e-boys’ have found popularity on the increasingly popular social media platform, Tik Tok, where users create and consume short videos on popular topics and interests. Furthermore, the unique style of these individuals has led to a resurgence in popularity for brands like Converse, Dr Martens, Urban Outfitters, and Bershka, as well as success for new brands like Shein.

Social media users have created the personas associated with these platforms, thus influencing the personas of these brands. As a result, many brands reflect their consumers’ demands in their marketing, thereby acknowledging the consumer as a collaborative creator of brand personas. (Singh et al, 2012)

The Takeaway

Overall, for modern consumers, their first experience of a brand is often via social media. Therefore, it is essential that brands carefully curate their social media profiles and reflect their brand accurately. By creating the right persona for a brand, and carefully curating communities, positive brand associations can lead to brand loyalists who become some of a brand’s best advocates as they promote the brand in an authentic, positive light and recruit new consumers without intricate marketing campaigns. (Fugetta, 2012) Considerate creation of a brand persona helps marketers understand customers. As a result, marketers can save time, effort, and resources when embarking on marketing campaigns.

To conclude, social media has made it extremely important for brands to create the right persona for their brand as customers consume marketing rapidly through social media, leaving little room for error.  Therefore, brands navigating social media and marketing today must find a balance between not only who the customer believes themselves to be and who they want to be, but also what they believe in. Ultimately, brands who strike this balance and truly understand their consumer will create accurate personas and thus find much more success than brands who fail to do so.

_Sources

Dion, D. and Arnould, E., 2016. Persona-fied brands: managing branded persons through persona. Journal of Marketing Management, 32(1-2), pp.121-148.

Fugetta, R., 2012. Brand advocates: turning enthusiastic customers into a powerful marketing force. John Wiley & Sons.

Schwager, A. and Meyer, C., 2007. Understanding Customer Experience. [online] Harvard Business Review. Available at: https://hbr.org/2007/02/understanding-customer-experience

Singh, S. and Sonnenburg, S., 2012. Brand performances in social media. Journal of interactive marketing, 26(4), pp.189-197.