A brand is like the lead character of its own story.  And like any story character, brands  have values and beliefs that become associated with them through their actions.  The challenge for marketers is to characterize their brands first before...

Here's a terrific infographic from colleague Jim Signorelli that will help you create a persona for your business. Once you have a persona, it becomes much easier to target your storytelling and marketing/branding efforts. And connect more forcefully with customers.

There are 2 ways of finding your persona:

1. Examine all of your stories and determine their common characteristics. Then look at Jim's infographic to refine and finalize those qualities. Create your persona based on your discoveries.
2. Examine this infographic to determine which character/characters you think you/your business embodies most. Check it against your stories. Build your persona from there.

What is a persona? It is a descriptive profile of a typical customer that includes a character type/archetype, demographic info, and as much flesh and bones information you can collect to create a bit of a story about this customer -- their likes, dislikes, challenges, etc.

Thanks Jim for putting together this very helpful infographic.

And if you want to dig into this topic more -- and get even smarter about using archetypes for marketing/branding -- read The Hero and The Outlaw; Building Extraordinary Brands Through the Power of Archetypes by M. Mark & C. Pearson. It's one of my bibles :)

This review was written by Karen Dietz for her curated content on business storytelling at www.scoop.it/t/just-story-it