Persona Profile for Branding

28 August 20

Part of branding work is to scope and understand the target market, it goes beyond answering who they are but also how they are and why. It is to see how they experience life every day and why they do what they do. This is the reason why branding is a user-centered process, it revolves around winning the target market with the right approach. In doing so, the target market persona profile is key. It is to describe the characteristics of the ideal audience of your brand, which involves multiple essential information such as age, gender, and education or income level for instance.

Laura Blake, author of Consumer Behaviour for Dummies, explains in How to Focus and Identify Your Target Market  that we need to be as specific as necessary. A series of questions would help narrow down the components required. The details later could be based on categories, classified into six: interests, needs, values, powers, behaviours, aspirations. Interests basically answer the question on how one spends their time. It is to discover anything they find stimulating in their everyday life. Needs refer to the essentials in one’s life. This could be things they already have or, on the contrary, parts which are missing. Values carry an even more important side in which it is to see meanings one hold in their life. Their everyday actions must have reasons and intentions, this is based on values one maintains.

Powers define what one is capable of - what they could do and more importantly, what they would do. This is to see how they would react to the possible call-to-action designed.  Behaviours dig one’s routines, their regular or habitual activity. It portrays certain patterns which brands might need to pay attention to. And the last one, aspirations. This would portray how they want to improve their life, and in knowing this, brands could find a way to be relevant to audience’ aims and ambitions. This seems to be really simple and straightforward, but more complicated in practice. It requires the right strategy of both branding and marketing. This is why the help from a brand agency or brand consultant like Milestone would do more in designing a persona profile as such. The persona profile design should start with comprehensive research digging deeper into the subject, thus creating a reliable foundation for brands to develop and work on.