In a situation where customers have a choice, their satisfaction with your brand goes only so far, and you may find that their loyalty to you is fickle. Brand equity by itself is an intangible asset. Its development depends on associations made by other companies, consumers as well as the media.

Brand Personality is one of the core dimensions of brand equity. Brand personality refers to the emotional side of a brand image. It is created by all experiences of consumers with a brand, but advertising plays a dominant role in personality creation. Brand personality and brand attributes, when combined, represent the image that a brand has in consumer’s minds. A company's brand personality can be thought of as the objective descriptors, attributes, or characteristics consumers apply to a company, e.g., reliable, good quality, well established, honest, and competent, etc.

For developing a strong brand personality, companies need to know two known points of reference before they can develop their creative solution. The first point of reference is a crystal clear picture of their business goals and objectives. The second step is the clear understanding of customer’s opinions, wants, and needs. Companies must learn and clearly understand the consumer's feelings, habits, motivations, insecurities, prejudices, and desires. They must understand how their brand fits into their life and how they might respond to different branding messages.

According to the Aaker’s framework for building brand personality, brand personality revolves around customers’ ideologies reading their self expression about a brand, their relationship with brands and the functional benefits derived from their preferred brands. These ideologies lead to stronger customer association with brands leading to brand loyalty.

Even in our usual research, we look for ways to dig deep beneath the typical surface answers. This can be done by asking the customers to discuss their association/involvement with a brand. Such exercises make it easier for customers to respond and companies to analyze where their brand's personality stands now and where the desired brand personality should be.

How to build Brand Personality:

Building strong brand personality requires special focus on advertising and packaging.

Advertising:

 The contents shown in the ads communicate a very strong message that leaves a very strong and lasting impression in customers’ minds

Packaging:

Second major component of brand personality is the packaging factor. It communicates much about brand personality e.g. color association - Golden/Silver colors are used to represent premium products.

The crux is that the creation of a brand personality is becoming more and more important for companies as they try and reach out to customers. As competition becomes harder for nearly all companies, it is becoming more and more important to have that little extra; something that makes you different from your competitors. All elements of the promotional mix need to be used to develop and sustain customer perceptions. Initially, the challenge is to build awareness, then to develop the brand personality and reinforce the perception.

Building strong brand personality results in strong brand equity which leads to brand loyalty. Of course, all the research shows that to build customer loyalty utilities must continue working to close performance gaps that exist between what customers want from their utility and what they perceive they get. But if utilities want to move up from earning customer satisfaction to building customer loyalty, they must devote far greater efforts on closing communications gaps that exist between their performance and customer perceptions of the value-added, branded utility itself.