What is the difference between a brand persona and buyer persona?

If you are researching digital marketing strategies, you have probably heard the term “personas”. It is often used to refer to buyer personas, which represent the ideal profile of your brand’s customer.

However, there is another type of marketing persona that is less known, but it is also essential in order to have reliable communication with customers: the brand persona.

Have you ever heard about this term? Don’t worry! In this post, we’ll explain why you should look at these two kinds of marketing personas and what are the main differences between them.

Buyer Persona

Understanding your market and your potential customers well is key to growing your business. That’s why building buyer personas is a crucial step in developing your brand’s content marketing strategy.

Also known as avatars, these personas summarize the profile and behavior of people who are more likely to be interested in your products or services.

Through a market study and interviews with your current customers, it’s possible to create characters that represent the people that you intend to reach with your marketing efforts.

Having these personas established will make your decision-making process a lot better. In other words, those moments when there are lingering doubts about which strategy to adopt, become much smoother when you understand who you are talking to.

However, what kind of information do these personas provide?

Unlike the target audience, which is a broad perspective of an audience’s segment you want to reach, the buyer persona offers a more detailed view of the people that make up this audience.

Therefore, in addition to demographic data, such as gender, age, and socio-economic profile, it is possible to go even deeper, identifying their tastes, hobbies, problems they need to solve and desires they have.

Have you built the buyer personas of your brand yet? Check out our Practical Guide to creating a persona for your business.

Brand Persona

In the same way that Buyer Persona synthesizes the main characteristics of its client, the Brand Persona represents the personality of its brand. That is, it embodies the values and perceptions that you’d like your audience to have of your company.

Several companies focus only on the definition of the buyer persona and, for this reason, they end up building a communication without identity.

Because of this, creating a Brand Persona is fundamental for those who are developing a content strategy for blogs, social networks and sales funnel. That will ensure you always keep the same tone of voice and pass on the desired message.

Besides, marketing professionals believe that, in spite of factors such as price and quality, the customer also takes into consideration brand identification in the purchase decision.

That is, if your customer is in doubt between brands with similar prices and qualities, the identity of each brand will, possibly, be the deciding factor.

Is Brand Persona the CEO of the company?

It is very common that when creating a brand persona, people become inspired by the personalities of the company’s leaders.

This strategy can be interesting when the goal is to create a closer relationship with customers. For example, you can send emails signed by the company’s director and use his tone and personality on social networks.

Also, in companies that are named after its founder, this association between the leader’s personality and the brand’s personality may make sense. We have, as an example, cosmetics brands that have products endorsed or even named after celebrities, often take advantage of the characteristics of such artists to create their marketing campaigns.

At the same time, it is necessary to be careful when taking on such tone of voice. There are situations where companies are led by people who don’t want to be the spokesperson or who don’t reflect the message that the brand wants to pass on.

For example, a tennis brand may want to position itself as modern and bold, but be led by traditional executives. In this case, it is necessary to create a brand persona that synthesizes the objectives of the brand.

How to create your Brand Persona?

To guide you in the construction of this type of marketing persona, you can try to answer some questions by thinking about your brand as if it were one person:

• How old are you?
• What is your occupation?
• What do you like to do in your free time?
• How do you communicate with each buyer?
• What is your purpose in the world?
• How does it differ from competitors?

At the end of these surveys, you will need to create a document with the following information:

• Brand pillars
• Tone of voice
• Vocabulary
• Topics of interest (other than those related to your brand)
• Flags or causes it stands by

The Brand Persona works as an internal guide for the marketing and sales teams to plan their actions more coherently and increase brand awareness of companies.

For example, consider a cosmetics company that defines itself as an entrepreneurial 30-year-old woman who likes to watch tv series, hang out with friends and practice yoga. She wants to raise the self-esteem of other women and advocate for self-love.

Her tone of voice is sensitive and friendly. She likes to call her clients friends and, in addition to talking about cosmetics, she also gives advice on healthy eating and physical activities, such as Yoga, Pole Dance, and Running.

With this profile in mind, it’s a lot easier to plan your content strategy and communicate with your buyers, isn’t it?

It is important to emphasize that this type of marketing persona doesn’t always need to be disclosed to customers. In other words, they don’t need to know that your brand is a 30-year-old woman, they need to perceive and identify with the values you want to associate with your brand.

Persona or Character?

In some cases, certain brands enter a market and become known for their character. This is the case, for example, of the Walt Disney company, which gave voice to Mickey Mouse, the widely known symbol of its brand.

Since the mascot assumed the tone of voice of social networks, its contents have already gone viral repeatedly, while interacting with other company profiles or being a part of TV shows and series.

As a result, a significant increase in sales was noticed. The success is related to the intimacy created between customers and the character, who communicates in a fun and accessible way, demonstrating the values the business.

In other words, when deciding between a brand persona or a character, it is necessary to understand the objectives of the brand. This is the only way to define the best approach when connecting with your customers.