Brand Identity vs. Brand Personality: How To Build Both

Water in a can hardly seems like fodder for comedy, but don’t tell that to Liquid Death. Under the guidance of Andy Pearson, the company’s vice president of creative, Liquid Death built a powerful brand personality that leads with humor. “It’s the fastest way to actually reach somebody and have a really powerful moment with somebody,” Andy tells the Shopify Masters podcast. “Laughter literally is an involuntary response to making a connection with somebody or something.”

Running hand-in-hand with a strong brand personality is a strong brand identity. While personality can inspire an emotional connection, identity provides a cohesive set of visual and tonal elements that make your brand recognizable and help that personality come through. Both brand identity and brand personality play critical roles in a business’s outreach and its marketing strategies. Here’s an in-depth look at how these two concepts overlap and differ, plus tips on how you can build a strong identity and personality for your brand. 

What is brand identity?

Brand identity is the cohesive set of visual, verbal, emotional, and experiential elements that a company uses to define how it wants customers to perceive it. Given that many market sectors have many businesses selling similar products at similar price points, a company’s brand identity focuses on making it recognizable and distinct from its competitors.

The visual elements of a brand identity include the logo, typography, graphics, and color palette. Put together, these design elements give the business a consistent look. Verbal and emotional elements include slogans, catch phrases, the company’s mission statement, and stated values. Brand values convey what the brand aspires to be within its market niche and throughout the world.

A brand identity is different from a company’s brand image, which is how customers perceive a brand, and branding, which describes the act of building a brand. Rather, a brand identity is a collection of the key elements that help a business stand out from similar companies that market themselves to the same target audience.

What is brand personality?

Brand personality refers to the set of human traits and emotional characteristics that consumers associate with a business. Like a human being, a brand can have personality traits. Some people are funny, some are serious, and some are irreverent; brands can be the same way. Individual people interact differently on social media; individual brands can as well. With this in mind, a brand personality focuses on the temperamental and emotional traits that define a company’s character—and can inform its communication strategy.

For example, when a brand communicates via billboards, marketing emails, and social media posts, it can showcase human characteristics that may help potential customers connect on a deeper level. Effective examples of brand identities include:

• Hiya Health. The children’s vitamin maker Hiya Health uses a transparent, family-oriented personality to sell its products, focusing on honesty about ingredients and a parent-to-parent conversational tone.

• Huel. Food and supplement maker Huel uses a functional, science-backed personality. Their brand voice is direct and rooted in data points, appealing to the types of customers who value efficiency and would thus be the type of people to try Huel’s streamlined approach to nourishment.

• BioLite. Off-grid energy company BioLite uses an adventurous, problem-solving personality to sell off-grid energy gear, appealing to the pioneering spirit of its loyal customer base. BioLite’s website and marketing materials frequently emphasize outdoor locations, subtly pushing a brand perception that’s both rugged and practical.

• Liquid Death. The aforementioned Liquid Death leans heavily into humor for its marketing campaigns. “Rather than trying to build this brand, we thought of it more like a character that just gets inserted in these different situations,” Andy says. “If we were writers on a show, we would just write for what that character would do in that scene. We’re just trying to answer the question, What would the character ‘Liquid Death’ do?”

Brand identity vs. brand personality

The core difference between brand identity and brand personality is that brand personality focuses on how your business perceives itself, whereas brand identity determines how it presents itself in the public sphere. Ecommerce success frequently requires mastering both, as this helps you achieve differentiation in a crowded market.

Brand identity consists of tangible elements that your customers can see and touch. Brand identity design includes your logo, carefully curated color schemes, fonts, and packaging, among other design elements. For example, the beauty brand Glossier became a household name partly due to its iconic pink pouches and sticker sheets. The brand used visual identity to turn a simple shipment into a shareable social media moment.

A solid brand identity also reflects the vision you have for your business. For example, Allbirds uses a minimalist, muted color palette and clean typography to reflect its commitment to natural materials and down-to-earth simplicity. Its intentional choices subtly communicate how Allbirds shoes aren’t in the same market sphere as Nike or Adidas; they fill their own unique niche.

Meanwhile, brand personality matters most when you’re deciding how to communicate your unique identity to the world. You can choose to be funny like Liquid Death, brainy like Huel, conversational like Hiya, or something else entirely. The most important part of choosing a brand personality is picking one that works for multiple types of marketing messaging, so every communication feels like it’s coming from the same brand.

How to build your brand identity

• Use your logo as a visual anchor
• Centralize your core brand assets
• Unify your website design

Building a brand identity becomes easier with a clear plan and strategic use of digital tools. Here are some tips for creating a brand identity that accurately reflects your business.

Use your logo as a visual anchor

Your logo is often the first impression customers get of your brand. Use Shopify’s Logo Maker to design a professional, on-brand logo that reflects your vision, values, and product positioning. A strong logo anchors the rest of your visual identity and makes your brand instantly recognizable.

Centralize your core brand assets

Consistency is key to identity, so it’s wise to house all your visual and verbal brand elements in one central place. Shopify’s brand assets manager makes it easy to store and organize your approved logos, color palettes, slogans, and descriptions. This ensures everyone on your team uses the same files and guidelines, which strengthens recall and reduces mismatches across channels.

Unify your website design

Your online store is your primary brand stage, as it’s the one place where you can control every element that shoppers encounter. If you use Shopify, you can customize your store theme with your logo, color, and typography. The goal is to make every page—home, product, and checkout—feel like a unified experience. 

How to develop your brand personality

• Focus on a small set of human traits
• Reinforce personality at every touchpoint
• Make decisions from your brand perspective

Here are some tips for creating a memorable brand personality. 

Focus on a small set of human traits 

Choose three to five traits that describe how your brand should feel (e.g., friendly, confident, down to earth, bold, helpful). Use these traits to create an approved list of word choices, tone guidelines, and descriptions, and store these inside Shopify’s brand assets manager. This way, everyone writing copy or marketing messages uses the same personality cues.

Reinforce personality at every touchpoint 

Your brand personality becomes real through everyday communication, your social media presence, and your ads. Ensuring your brand personality comes through at each touchpoint helps create a cohesive experience for your customers. For example, support and promotional emails are great for communicating your brand personality, since you’re not beholden to anyone else (such as a social media platform) to communicate your message. Shopify merchants can use Shopify Email to apply brand voice, syntax, and tone consistently across all email templates.

Make decisions from your brand perspective

As you grow, filter your decision-making process through your brand’s human traits. Unless you plan on doing a big rebrand, staying consistent across your brand personality and values will help ensure long-term marketing success. Just as Andy Pearson asks his team, “What would the character ‘Liquid Death’ do?” you too can personify your brand to guide new endeavors, marketing, and expansion.