Does Your Avatar Match Your Brand?

Here is an example I use in our avatar guide because it is so obvious once you hear it: if the person you built is thrifty, a coupon clipper who never pays full price, and you are selling a high-end product, those two do not align. One of them is wrong. Either you built the wrong person, or you built the wrong brand, and no amount of advertising will fix a mismatch like that. It only makes it louder.

The review is the hardest step

Reviewing and verifying your avatar is often the hardest part of the whole process, because it requires you to step outside of the thing you just made and look at it as a neutral party. You are looking for two kinds of problems: the very blatant contradictions, and the subtle things you overlooked because you were too close.

Ask these questions with the avatar in one hand and your internal brand from earlier in this track in the other.

Does the avatar match up with the product or service being offered? Does the avatar actually make sense, meaning are there really people like this out there, and are there enough of them to be a market? Is there a tweak to the avatar that would make it a better target? Does the company’s current branding, both internal and external, align with this person? And is there anything specific about the avatar that stands out and you have not acted on?

That fourth question is the one this lesson is about. Internal brand is your vision, mission, values and beliefs. External brand is what the avatar can see. If Mary, the bank accountant from our guide who looks for value rather than a bargain, sees a flyer shouting “cheapest in town,” she is gone. The flyer was written for someone else.

Three kinds of mismatch

The first is price. Your avatar’s income, car and shopping habits tell you what they expect to pay and how they judge value. If you built a person who shops at the premium grocery store and drives a new SUV, and your brand competes on being the lowest bid, either the person or the brand has to change. The image you portray decides which customers you get, and right now it is deciding against your own avatar.

The second is values and beliefs. In the guide the example is a spiritual-but-not-religious avatar paired with a religious-based offer. It will not appeal to them. The same thing happens with tone. A blue-collar avatar who values straight talk will not trust a brand that sounds like a corporate brochure, and a professional avatar who values discretion will not trust a brand that shouts.

The third is channel and look. Your avatar’s social media preference, the shows they watch, where they look for information: these tell you where the brand needs to show up and how it needs to look when it does. A beautifully designed brand in a place the avatar never visits is a mismatch too, just a quieter one.

Which one do you change?

When you find a contradiction, you have a choice, and it is a real choice. You can adjust the avatar or adjust the brand.

Adjust the avatar when the person you built is not actually who buys from you, or when there are not enough of them, or when you built your fantasy customer instead of your real one. Owners do this all the time: they describe the client they wish they had, and then wonder why the ads do not work.

Adjust the brand when the avatar is right and the business has drifted. This is Jorge with the red chairs. He knew who he wanted. The business stopped matching. Bringing the external brand back into line with the avatar finishes the job you started with your vision.

And be honest about a third option: sometimes the avatar and the brand are both right, and it is the belief in the middle that is wrong. The owner who believes “my people will not pay for that” has built a discount brand for an avatar who would have paid. Go back to your beliefs page.

Revisit it on purpose

Repeat this check regularly. Customers give you feedback, the market shifts, and your user base migrates from one platform to another over time. The guide is explicit that the review should be repeated on a frequent basis. Put it on the calendar twice a year: pull out the avatar, pull out the brand, read them side by side, and mark every place they disagree.

Run the review

Sit your avatar and your one-page internal brand next to each other and go through the five review questions above, writing a yes or a no for each. For every no, decide in writing whether the avatar changes or the brand changes, and what the first visible fix is. Then find one piece of your current marketing that your avatar would ignore, and pull it.

Plan on an hour or two, and it is free. The honest version is slower, because it means admitting that a customer you have been chasing was never going to buy, or that a piece of your brand you like was built for you. If you cannot be neutral, ask another business owner to run the questions with you.