21-04-2012, 03:40 PM
Brand Personality
Brand personality is the way a brand speaks and behaves. It means assigning human personality traits/characteristics to a brand so as to achieve differentiation. These characteristics signify brand behaviour through both individuals representing the brand (i.e. it’s employees) as well as through advertising, packaging, etc. When brand image or brand identity is expressed in terms of human traits, it is called brand personality. Brand personality is nothing but personification of brand. A brand is expressed either as a personality who embodies these personality traits (For instance - Shahrukh Khan and Airtel, John Abraham and Castrol) or distinct personality traits (For instance - Dove as honest, feminist and optimist; Hewlett Packard brand represents accomplishment, competency and influence). Brand personality is the result of all the consumer’s experiences with the brand. It is unique and long lasting. Brand personality develops brand equity. It sets the brand attitude. It is a key input into the look and feel of any communication or marketing activity by the brand. It helps in gaining thorough knowledge of customers feelings about the brand. Brand personality differentiates among brands specifically when they are alike in many attributes.
Brand Personality of pepsi
Pepsi has always had a young target audience. Many of their ads were historically targeted at teens and even pre-teens and are injected with fun, sports and most often, music. Pepsi has leveraged all manner of musical celebrities over the years, from Ray Charles to Britney Spears.Check out the commercial on YouTube featuring Michael Jackson and a group of kids that are probably far too young to legally target for such a sugary product these days!
When Pepsi wasn’t using musical celebrities, humor was their weapon of choice, again utilizing young kids in the ads. Who could forget the lovable little girl telling the bartender, “I asked for a Pepsi Pal” in the voice of the Godfather?
2008: Pepsi Changes Everything
In the evolution image above we saw Pepsi roll along with popular design trends as they introduced Photoshop-centric gradients, shadows and highlights. As with every good design trend, this was firmly rejected by the designers of the next decade.
The design community’s eventual response was a full-throttle rebirth of minimalism. Every brand that made their logos look shinier in the late 90s suddenly hit command-z and started stripping their personalities through thin, sans-serif fonts and simple, solid colors. Even today we are still in this stage as brands like Gap, Tropicana and more seek new life through more generic looking designs, often with results so hated by consumers that the companies immediately revert to their old brand image.
By now we’re all familiar with Pepsi’s foray into this trend. After decades of refining, they hit the Pepsi globe with the ugly stick, trashed the familiar bold typography and gave us this:
Emotional brand ties aside simply don’t see the logic behind this project. Keeping the image young and fresh is one thing, wasting millions of dollars to twist and smudge your iconic logo is another. It wasn’t completely against Pepsi reverting to a simpler design, but they had a really strong and recognizable logo to revert to and are not sure rethinking it so dramatically was either necessary or effective in any way.
What makes this overhaul absolutely laughable is the explanation behind it from the Arnell Group. Shortly after the rebranding went public a PDF was leaked which is amazingly nonsensical in its attempt to be sophisticated.
Pepsi has since recovered from the public’s hatred of their new brand simply by trudging on. The redesign of their entire line of drinks has stuck with the exception of Sierra Mist, whose strange foggy forest design has already been abandoned for a new look that is actually quite attractive by comparison.
Meanwhile, Pepsi’s overall personality has stayed pretty much the same as they continue to primarily use humor and music in their advertising. This year’s Super Bowl featured several humorous Pepsi Max commercials and the Pepsi website prominently features an index of “emerging artists”.