Brand Persona: Find Your Brand’s Personality With Kris Jenner

A brand persona, also known as a brand personality, is a marketing strategy that assigns human personality traits to a particular company brand name through an idea, person, character, or mascot. A good brand persona aims to match the buyer persona of potential customers to the product’s brand identity, creating a solid brand-associated customer base.

Brand personas create a bridge between your company and the target customers you’d like to reach by inventing a type of personality to which your ideal customer relates. Especially if you have a small business or a startup, the messaging your company uses can be a powerful tool to reach specific audience segments and get them interested in a new product. Even if you don’t have a brand strategy, a brand voice will emerge on its own.

You might think of brand personas as human archetypes, attracting the types of customers who have positive associations with a particular persona because it matches their own demographic. The types of brand personas most commonly used include:

1. 1. Competence: If you relate to competence, you may feel drawn to accomplishment, and success through hard work, leadership, influence, and knowledge.
2. 2. Excitement: An excited target audience refers to youthfulness, a carefree attitude, adventure, and a free spirit.
3. 3. Ruggedness: If you’re a rugged type of person, you enjoy the outdoors, toughness, athleticism, roughing it, and a do-it-yourself attitude
4. 4. Sincerity: Sincere customers appreciate kindness, family, friends, nurturing, thoughtfulness, and empathy.
5. 5. Sophistication: If you relate to sophistication, you appreciate style, elegance, prestige, and wealth.

You’ll find brand personas for major companies just about everywhere. Some examples include:

1. 1. Disney: The Disney brand persona promotes wholesome family fun, excitement, and sincerity, as captured by Disneyland’s tagline, “the happiest place on Earth.” The Disney marketing team only approves positive, friendly, fun messaging to a family-oriented target market. Learn more from Disney CEO Bob Iger on the value of brand.
2. 2. Good American Fashion: Khloe Kardashian cofounded Good American fashion, which celebrates and produces clothing for women of all body shapes. The brand persona of Good American is sincerity and inclusivity and was born out of Khloe’s frustrations around finding clothes that fit her shape and style.
3. 3. SKIMS Shapewear: Kim Kardashian’s struggle to find comfortable shapewear drove her to create SKIMS for women of all shapes and sizes. According to Kim,“having that perfect first layer” allows her to feel more confident and pushes her to experiment. Excitement, sincerity, and sophistication drive this brand.
4. 4. Poosh: Kourtney Kardashian’s lifestyle website promotes products, recipes, and advice inspired by Kourtney’s experiences and her dedication to wellness. The name Poosh comes from a nickname she gave her daughter, and the website promotes sincerity, sophistication, and excitement.
5. 5. Safely: Kris Jenner’s love of cleaning and desire for natural ingredients spawned her participation in this plant-based cleaning product line. The line promotes sincerity and competence.
6. 6. Kylie Cosmetics: Kylie Jenner turned her cosmetics company into an extension of her personal brand by modeling her own products and using her existing following for social media marketing. Her brand promotes excitement and sincerity.
7. 7. Halfway Dead Clothing: Rob Kardashian celebrates life with his clothing line, Halfway Dead, which he describes as “the balance of all things: happy and sad, winning and losing, life and death.” The brand persona combines excitement with ruggedness.
8. 8. Spanx: Sara Blakely started the Spanx empire out of her apartment, and the company’s brand persona reflects these roots. Sophisticated but with a sense of humor, trailblazing but sincere, Spanx continues to dominate in the world of women’s hosiery. Get Sara Blakely’s tips for marketing a product.
9. 9. Starbucks: Starbucks relies on digital marketing on social media, making them relatable to many people. Their brand persona includes sincerity, accessibility, friendliness, sophistication, and a sense of adventure. Learn about leading a values-based business from former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz.

Kris Jenner and the entire Kardashian-Jenner family have skyrocketed to fame thanks to her branding know-how. Here are Kris’s top tips for creating a brand persona:

1. 1. Be honest. Kris believes that honesty and sincerity about your brand forges a bond of trust between your company and your target audience. “Be true to yourself. Be the best version of yourself that you can be,” Kris says. “If you want to create something that isn’t really true to yourself, people are gonna pick up on that right away. I think the beauty of what I do is that ‘Kris Jenner the brand’ and ‘Kris Jenner the person’ are very, very similar.”
2. 2. Be persistent and patient. Allow yourself enough time and adjustments to see progress. “Don’t give up! This may take a little while to get off the ground,” Kris says. “It does take time. And it does evolve. And it does need some tweaks. You have to be ready to pivot and change direction once in a while.”
3. 3. Be specific. Spend your time focusing on what exactly you want your brand to be. “Monetizing a personal brand means a lot of hard work and figuring out what you’re gonna sell,” Kris says. “So you have to think carefully about what you’re putting out there in the world and what everybody desires and wants to see from you.”
4. 4. Find brand collaborators. Kris collaborates with several companies whose products she uses and loves. “The best way to seek out a collaboration for a brand is really going after something that you yourself admire,” she says.
5. 5. Find your passion. Kris believes that, above all else, knowing what you love doing will tell you where to start. “I think if you really wanna create a brand and figure out what is your story and where you wanna start, you really have to honestly look inside yourself,” Kris says. “Spend some time thinking about what really makes you happy—what you love.”
6. 6. Know and connect with your target audience. Knowing your target audience will determine your brand messaging. “That’s something that hopefully there’s been given a lotta thought to before you ever got started with your brand, so you know who you’re talking to,” Kris says. “Once you’ve found your audience, you need to work hard on connecting with them and build up that engagement.”
7. 7. Social media is critical. Use social media to help you, as Kris explains, “find consumers—other like-minded people who are engaged with brands similar to yours. Engage your own followers by asking for help to spread the word, and send your product to friends and family and ask them to share on social. If you can become an influencer, that is something that will both increase your target audience and enhance your brand.”
8. 8. Use a vision board. Kris loves using vision boards to get clear on her goals. “I think that anyone who wants to start a personal brand for themselves should start working on a vision board as soon as they figure out what their story is,” Kris says. Your board might include “who you wanna talk to, who you’re focused on, who your audience is. . . slowly mapping out where you want your message because there are so many options today.”

Develop your online presence and stand out from the crowd with tips from business icon Kris Jenner. Get the MasterClass Annual Membership for advice on how to use social media, from establishing a connection across platforms to leveraging metrics for direction. Promote yourself with her personal brand tips and remember: “You’re doing amazing, sweetie.”