Buyer Persona vs. Brand Persona: What’s the Difference?

The vast realm of eCommerce is filled with specifics, authentic terms and concepts, pitfalls, and brain-busting moments. If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, you need to wrap your head around most every nuance of the industry. Namely, the concepts of brand persona and buyer persona aren’t outlined enough to get a good understanding of both right away. What is the underlying difference between the two? If you don’t know, we’re here to make your life easier and define these terms with some explanations and examples.

What Are “Personas”?

In any commercial business, there are different targeted audiences (TAs) of customers that are segmented and summarized by certain characteristics. And there is also branding. Coming up with a collective portrait of your target audience of buyers is a crucial stage of starting up or maintaining any eCommerce.

The services or products you offer and how you offer them should be based on this portrait because the main goal of business is to turn as many people as possible into buyers and keep them satisfied, thus achieving stable, steadily growing sales.

Buyer persona

What is a buyer persona? In simple words, it is a generalized character that you should know how to treat and satisfy their main pain points, needs, and tendencies. But how does your target audience perceive your brand? See, this is the flip side of the whole thing. And it’s easy to miss this point. The wholesome vision of your brand for potential customers is as important as your vision of your TA.

Brand persona

This brings us to the brand persona, which is the personality of a brand – the essential characteristics of your business. The main traits that tie up your offers and make your business image consistent. Such traits can be similar to human mood sets and types of personalities (e.g., formality or casualness, conciseness or descriptiveness, strictness or simplicity).

The important thing is that the brand persona is more about the emotional association. This detail separates it, for example, from the brand image – a presentation of the main benefits that the business brings and its main purposes. However, the brand persona also covers many TA portrait points, such as:

• demographics (age, region)
• education
• occupation
• personal status (married/single, etc.)
• price sensitivity
• product preferences
• needs and goals

Brand Personality vs. Buyer Persona

You will be shocked, but brand and buyer personas are interdependent concepts based on one another. That’s why it is so difficult to point out the difference between them. It all comes down to the fact that you must relate to your potential buyers if you want them to pay attention and see you as a reputable provider.

In a nutshell, your brand’s traits should correlate with your TA’s characteristics. For this, you should first analyze and paint a picture of your TA, i.e., outline a buyer persona. It should serve as the foundation for forming the emotional association. To better understand what we’re talking about, let’s take a look at some successful brand persona cases.

Brand Persona Examples

How these brands position themselves in the eyes of their target customers should give you a pretty good idea about approaching your brand persona the right way.

Nike

Active people who are into sports and adrenaline-pumping activities always seek inspiration to move forward and achieve new goals. And Nike fires up their motivation with the inspirational motto (the famous “Just do it!”), focusing on efficiency and promotion of a general image of a winner.

As simple as that, by positioning themselves as the absolute #1, Nike efficiently warms up the ego of every go-getter out there. See what they did there? This is why it is so important to identify with your buyers to be successful.

IKEA

You probably already know IKEA’s approach – a simple, casual yet absolutely practical everyday life. Nothing more, nothing less. The main goal of IKEA products is to help buyers tie up a minimalistic, stylish, balanced living space. That’s why their brand persona is about balance, simplicity, and carelessness of life. This perfectly fits their main segment of customers – adults with the budget and desire to buy new furniture who aren’t into leopard print beds and plain linoleum floors.

Coca-Cola

To put it harshly – you have no heart if you don’t relate to those amazing Christmas ads. Coca-Cola has managed to cover the widest audience of potential buyers by focusing on family values, childhood nostalgia, and the kind, fairytale-like atmosphere of winter holidays. This is how you come up with the vibes to revolutionize the business.

Wrapping It Up

When you need to form a persona for your brand, there is no standard template. The main pro tip here is to build your business persona background according to the main traits and moods of your target audience. You can create a simple buyer persona checklist and analyze how you can relate to your buyers point by point.

Does your TA consist of serious, business-minded adult entrepreneurs? Be formal and to the point. Do you focus on younger IT enthusiasts? Keep it simple and charismatic, and don’t forget to throw in some memes. Just make sure that if you were in the place of your buyer, you’d pay attention to the brand, and you’ll do fine.