When you think about companies you love — ones that you are completely loyal to — what attributes do they share? Chances are high that one of them is that you know exactly what that company stands for and why they deserve your business.

• Creating a brand persona is the process that establishes your company’s personality — the one you want your customers to love and tell their friends about. Or, to put it another way, your brand is what people say about you when you aren’t in the room.
• Once you have established your company persona, you need to get the word out to customers. But, to be most effective, you can’t just broadcast a single message to the universe (a practice that’s been dubbed, “spray and pray”), because speaking to everyone means connecting with no one.
• Instead, today’s most influential and revered companies understand that you need to craft specific messages to different audiences.
• For example, a cross-over SUV manufacturer will have one ad playing during the Winter Games featuring skiers heading to the slopes, while another ad for the same car on the Golf Channel may feature safety and comfort features.
• It’s the same for your customers. It’s essential to identify your different customer and prospect segments, but even more powerful is creating personas for those segments.
• Developing customer personas allows us to “take a deep dive” to uncover who your existing customers are but more important, how to find more customers like them.

Based on our Discovery, we create a company “avatar,” a personification of your company. This avatar is a quick reference for marketing, sales, and frontline staff. The company avatar has a personality — it’s classy or sophisticated, tweets or doesn’t, uses big, bold statements or is succinct and to the point. You use your company brand to build trust with your customers. You are letting them know who you are, who you aren’t. and — most importantly — what they can expect from you.