The first step in the branding process is to identify who your users are. We do this through an exercise we call User Profiles. Building User Profiles helps you zero in on exactly who your users are, what they want, how they want you to talk to them, and how they expect you to help them.

For our own rebrand, we narrowed down our users to three basic types:

1. Seasoned Agricultural and Industrial Companies
2. Young Entrepreneurs & Startups
3. Traditional Corporate Executives

For each of these user types, we built Personas and mapped out their journey to our brand. A persona is a hypothetical character we make up based on commonalities we’ve seen with these types of users. We give them a name and make up a story that is likely to be true for them.

When you build personas, the goal is to really empathize with your users and put yourself in their shoes. The way we do this is by asking the right questions. Download the User Profile Workbook for details on how we build user profiles at Butler Branding.

Included in the workbook is an example of a persona we created based on the Seasoned Agricultural and Industrial Company user type. We named him Chris Bowman (which is a made-up name, so if there’s a Chris Bowman out there reading this it’s purely coincidental) and gave him the archetype of “The Entrepreneurial Good-Ol-Boy”. The name, business, archetype, story, and everything about this user is made up to give us a realistic character that we would likely be serving in our area.