A brand is like the lead character of its own story.  And like any story character, brands  have values and beliefs that become associated with them through their actions.  The challenge for marketers is to characterize their brands first before...

Here's a terrific infographic from colleague Jim Signorelli that will help you create a persona for your business. Once you have a persona, it becomes much easier to target your storytelling and marketing/branding efforts. And connect more forcefully with customers.

There are 2 ways of finding your persona:

1. Examine all of your stories and determine their common characteristics. Then look at Jim's infographic to refine and finalize those qualities. Create your persona based on your discoveries.
2. Examine this infographic to determine which character/characters you think you/your business embodies most. Check it against your stories. Build your persona from there.

What is a persona? It is a descriptive profile of a typical customer that includes a character type/archetype, demographic info, and as much flesh and bones information you can collect to create a bit of a story about this customer -- their likes, dislikes, challenges, etc.

Thanks Jim for putting together this very helpful infographic.

And if you want to dig into this topic more -- and get even smarter about using archetypes for marketing/branding -- read The Hero and The Outlaw; Building Extraordinary Brands Through the Power of Archetypes by M. Mark & C. Pearson. It's one of my bibles :)

This review was written by Karen Dietz for her curated content on business storytelling at www.scoop.it/t/just-story-it 

While it may not have been popular marketing theory at the time, the most successful brands figured out decades ago that it takes character to turn a product into a brand. When a brand has character, it takes on an identity of its own. Its every word, gesture, action, became natural expressions which make the brand instantly recognizable.

What is the character or persona of your brand? The company Added Value has a tool called CharacterLab that helps you figure this out.

There is a free demo to try at this site. The demo will give you a series of photos and characteristics to rank. At the end it will give you the character/persona of your business -- if you are a sole proprietor.

Give yourself some time to work through the demo -- it will get you thinking and the sorting isn't easy. But I was very pleased with my results!

Turns out my business is characterized as the Creator/Sage. Just make sure you take notes at the end. I tried to bookmark my results, but when I tried to view that page again, it led me back to the original demo page. Bummer! But understandable.

Once you have your results then the real work begins -- crafting your brand to be in alignment with your character/persona. That includes aligning the language you use, your colors and graphics, web design, and marketing materials to your character/persona.

Knowing your character/persona really takes a lot of the mystery out of creating your brand and telling your stories.

So go have fun!