Your Brand Already Has a Personality (Make Sure You Like It)

“Brand strategy” sounds like something that belongs to companies with a bustling marketing department (and money to burn).

But that doesn’t have to be the case.

Truly, it’s just all the planning you should do up front when defining your small business and building out your marketing materials — so you’re not scrapping your logo, rewriting all the content on your website, and starting over six months from now, all of which will cost you far more time and money than getting it right the first time.

Do this early in your brand building to custom craft how customers feel about your company.

All you really need at this point is time, determination, and good questions to point you in the right way.

What Is a Brand Strategy?

A brand strategy is a roadmap for how to use your brand to achieve your business goals.

A solid brand strategy looks at everything: shoppers, what you’re selling, how customers experience your business, your company culture, and what your competitors are doing. From there, building your strategy is all about nailing down the positioning that will help you attract the right people and grow.

Your brand strategy answers the question: What do I want people to think, feel, and do when they encounter my business?

Define Your Brand Strategy With These 7 Questions

Work through each of the following questions, and you’ll have the building blocks of a brand strategy that’s uniquely yours.

1. Who Is Your Target Audience?

Before you can build a brand that resonates, you need to know who you’re trying to reach.

Think about your ideal customer’s age, lifestyle, values, problems, and what they care about. The more clearly you can picture this person, the more effectively you’ll be able to communicate with them.

2. What Are Your Company Values?

Your values are the principles that guide how your business operates — how you make decisions, treat customers, and show up day to day.

Naming these clearly helps you build a brand that feels authentic and consistent, rather than manufactured.

Take, for example, Ben & Jerry’s, a once-small company that’s become famous both for its flavors and social justice values.

Values that stick and stand out like this have a few things in common:

• They’re specific, not generic. For example, the values at Ben & Jerry’s don’t just mumble about “going green,” they really commit to “Environmental Protection, Restoration, & Regeneration.”
• They mean something — the company probably has to make some trade-offs to honor them. Taking a stance doesn’t always line up with maximizing profit under capitalism, but Ben & Jerry’s still goes there, stating in their values: “We are committed to achieving equity, opportunity, and justice for communities across the globe that have been historically marginalized … ”
• They’re visible in how the brand behaves, not just marketing speak. You can see how Ben & Jerry’s lives up to its statement that “ … using our business to make the world a better place gives our work its meaning” when you visit their Issues We Care About page and see all the groups they support and actions they take on various topics. 

3. What’s Your Competitive Differentiation?

What do you offer that your competitors don’t? Answering this honestly requires looking at your business from the outside in.

A useful tool here is a SWOT analysis, which is an assessment of your business’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. The framework gives you a clear picture of where you stand in the market and where you have room to differentiate.

To run one, grab a piece of paper and work through each quadrant:

• Strengths (you control): What do you do well? What do customers compliment you on? What advantages do you have over competitors (price, expertise, location, relationships)?
• Weaknesses (you control): Where do you fall short? What do you lack? This could include time, skills, resources, reviews, and so on. Try to be brutally honest here. This is where the most useful insights live.
• Opportunities (external): What’s changing in your market that you could take advantage of? New platforms, underserved audiences, gaps a competitor isn’t filling?
• Threats (external): What could hurt your business? New competitors, shifting customer behavior, rising costs, platform algorithm changes?

Once you’ve filled it out, think about how you can use those strengths to capture opportunities, and how to shore up weaknesses before threats become problems.

👉 Quick Note: The Weakness quadrant is where most business owners go vague. Resist that urge. The less comfortable it is to fill out, the more useful it will be.

4. What Personality Do You Want to Portray?

Your brand already has a personality, whether you’ve thought about it or not.

Every email you send, every post you publish, every conversation with a customer is projecting something. The question is whether it’s projecting what you want.

Warm and approachable?

Bold and direct?

Calm and authoritative?

Nail this down early, as it keeps everything feeling cohesive, and you’ll want to refer back to it anytime you build out more features of your awesome digital presence.

For a structured approach, the Brand Personality Framework developed by Jennifer L. Aaker is the most widely-used starting point. It’s been around since 1997, and it still holds up. Which means either it’s timeless or brand personalities haven’t changed much in 30 years. Either way, use it.

5. How Do You Want to Come Across, Visually?

Colors, fonts, and logos aren’t the brand; they’re the outfit the brand wears. Get the personality right first, and the design decisions get easier. Get the design decisions first, and you’ll be redesigning in two years.

Before you invest in design work, get clear on the mood and aesthetic you’re going for. Gather reference images and real-life examples, describe the vibe in words, and think about brands you admire and why.

What does this phase actually look like in real life? Take a peek behind the scenes at how the DreamHost team brought together various inspirations —including old logos, new website designs, and possibly too many cooks in the kitchen — to assist in creating a new logo.

Later, when you dive into making specific design decisions with your brand, the guidelines you solidify here will help you avoid fatigue and overwhelm.

6. What Are Your Goals for Your Brand?

Brand strategy ultimately exists to serve business objectives. Your goals shape what you prioritize and how you measure success.

Setting goals for the first time can feel so open-ended, and that can be paralyzing. So let us share with you how we think of goals, and some examples to get you started.

Short-term goals cover the next year or so. Think launching a new product, growing your customer base by a specific percentage, or hitting a sales milestone.

Long-term goals zoom out to three to five years and beyond. Things like expanding into new markets, diversifying your offerings, or becoming the go-to name in your niche.

Whichever timeframe you’re working in, your goals should follow the SMART framework, meaning they’re Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound.

That means attaching real numbers to your goals, grounding them in your business’s actual values and capacity, and resisting the urge to set targets that sound impressive but aren’t realistic.

After all, vague or inflated goals don’t motivate; they demoralize. A goal like “grow revenue by 20% before Q4” gives you something to work toward. “Become a bigger brand” doesn’t.

Finally, to paraphrase 38 Special, hold on to those goals, but somewhat loosely. Markets shift, circumstances change, and a good goal today might need adjusting in six months.

7. What Can Your Existing Offerings and Customers Tell You?

If you’ve been in business for any length of time, you already have data to work with.

What do your best customers say about why they chose you? What do your reviews highlight? What products or services get the most engagement?

Your existing business is full of clues about what your brand is already doing well — and where you could use some improvement.

A note here: Seeing a direction you actually don’t want to keep going in with your products or services? Catching on to a customer type that isn’t working well for your goals as you build out your small business?

That’s OK! Good, even.

This step is all about getting introspective and pivoting if where you are doesn’t align with where you want to go.

As a Small Business, Should I Really Bother with Brand Strategy?

Your brand strategy is the backbone of everything your audience sees, hears, and feels when they encounter your business. Get it right, and you create a unified identity that builds trust, earns loyalty, and makes your business impossible to forget.

The payoff is real.

Gartner found that businesses that build a strong brand strategy are twice as likely to exceed their growth goals and more than three times as likely to exceed their marketing campaign goals.

For small businesses in particular, brand strategy also levels the playing field.

You may not have the ad budget of a national brand, but you can absolutely out-position them in your niche by being clearer, more consistent, and more human than they are.

Customers can tell the difference between a business that knows and cares about who it is and who it’s for, compared to one that doesn’t.

Next Step: Put It into Action with a Brand Strategy Template

Especially if this is your first time putting together a well-planned brand, a template can make it much easier to move from reflection to action, and keep everything in one place as your business grows.

Smartsheet provides several free brand strategy templates that can be downloaded and edited to implement all the pieces you’ve been thinking through above and see how they work together.

Some tips to help you “put pen to paper,” so to speak:

1. Block out a few hours to work through your chosen template without interruption: This isn’t a form to fill out quickly; it’s a thinking exercise.
2. Answer every section honestly, not aspirationally: Where is your brand right now, and where do you want it to go?
3. Revisit it: Your brand strategy is a living document: Plan to review and update it at least once a year, or any time your business goes through a significant change.

Making Your Brand, Yours

That’s it, that’s the whole framework!

Figure out who you’re for, what you stand for, what sets you apart, how you want to look and sound, and where you’re headed.

Can you tell we’re obsessed with making this as simple and achievable as possible, right now?

Answer these prompts honestly and you’ve got a brand strategy that’s genuinely yours — not a copy of a competitor and no icky feeling you’re trying to emulate some behemoth brand that just isn’t you.

You actually already got the hard part out of the way: deciding you were going to commit the time and effort to slow down and think strategically about your brand. Now it’s just a matter of getting it out of your head and onto the page.