Dynamic Marketing Communiqué

Check out how the “First Lady of Fast Food” increased its Twitter followers to 970,000 in 2018 through her sassy personality! [Thursdays: FYO!]

December 9, 2021

Brand personality.

This refers to human characteristics—usually expressed as adjectives—that convey how you want your target market to perceive your brand. 

Examples: 

Apple has a minimalist, sophisticated, and creative personality. 

NIKE is active, inspirational, exciting, and cool. 

Volvo positions itself as a responsible, trustworthy, reliable, and family-man brand. 

Through these personalities, these brands are able to connect with their customers on an emotional level and influence their purchasing decisions. 

Do you know that aside from connecting with customers, having a brand personality also helps strengthen your business’ online presence and visibility? 

To show you the truth behind this, here’s an example of a brand that interacts with consumers online with the help of a sassy brand personality.

Wendy’s is the third largest US hamburger chain founded by Dave Thomas in 1969. It currently has more than 6,500 restaurants operating worldwide. 

With an iconic image of a smiling redheaded girl in pigtails, the brand secures a generally wholesome image.

… but there seems to be a bit of an issue. 

When Chief Concept and Marketing Officer Kurt Kane joined the company in 2015, he saw Wendy’s to be a “very bureaucratic place.”

While Wendy’s positions itself as a likable and sassy brand, Kane found that the need for management’s approval over every little thing the brand has to post online has negative impacts on its branding.

Before we continue the story…

Let’s first talk about the benefits of having a brand personality and how it gives businesses an advantage over their competitors. 

An effectively implemented brand personality helps with a brand’s:

  • Differentiation: Your brand personality will differentiate you from your competitors. Even if you offer the same product, your marketing strategies will differ depending on your chosen personality.
  • Awareness: Brand awareness is not just about letting customers become aware of your brand, but also about cultivating preference. This means that even though there are other brands in the same market or industry, consumers will still choose to transact with your brand.
  • Loyalty: A well-defined brand personality encourages genuine customer engagement… and when there’s genuine engagement, there’s brand association. This also leads to customer loyalty and satisfaction in purchasing your products or services. 
  • Online visibility: Brand personality helps improve your business’ online presence. The engagement you cultivate through social media interactions leads your target market not only to your posts, but also to your brand’s social media pages. 

Going back to Wendy’s brand personality and marketing strategy…

To empower the brand’s social media team, Kane let the team have free reign on the Wendy’s Twitter account as long as the tweets do not go against Twitter’s policies and ethical standards.

The fast food chain started implementing this approach in 2017, but it wasn’t until 2018 when the brand’s “roasts” became viral through direct competition. 

This gave Wendy’s the name, “First Lady of Fast Food,” because of its series of Twitter “beefs.” 

Instead of turning off potential customers, Wendy’s witty and straightforward tweets actually ended up attracting the attention of lots of Twitter users. This resulted in genuine engagements between the brand and its target market! 

Talk about brand personality at its finest! 

How did Wendy’s sassy personality help strengthen its online presence? 

Establishing a brand personality and sticking to it made Wendy’s stand out on the Internet. In fact, the strategy was so successful that it ended up helping the brand in numerous ways!

  • Wendy’s Twitter followers increased to almost a million (970,000) in October 2018. The brand’s follower count is still growing, thanks to the continuous use of a sassy persona.
  • Wendy’s was the 2018 Shorty Awards’ Gold Winner for Best Use of Twitter due to its trendy and innovative use of the social media platform for marketing.
  • In 2018, the fast food chain released an album titled, “We Beefin” with original singles. This was a tribute to all the witty posts the brand has on Twitter. A female rapper who was purposely kept anonymous took on the persona of Wendy. One of the songs in the album, “Rest in Grease,” topped Spotify’s Global Viral chart. The song was also commended by rappers T-Pain and Tory Lanez. 
  • Wendy’s won the Gold Award at the 2018 American Business Awards.
  • With the help of the brand personality strategy, Wendy’s achieved a 3.8% increase in its total revenue in 2018.

A round of applause for Wendy’s! These achievements show a strong and outstanding brand personality helps boost a business’ digital presence.

– – –

The brand personality you establish is what customers will identify with. This connection will help cultivate customers’ positive feelings for your brand and enhance entertainment, preference, and loyalty. 

What’s more? 

Having a memorable brand personality doesn’t just help increase your brand’s online visibility; it also differentiates you from your competitors!

So, as a business owner or marketer, make sure you maintain a consistent brand persona across all your marketing channels and platforms and know how to use it wisely.

With an authentic, well-thought brand personality, you’ll establish a strong reputation in your field and… 

Create a connection with your target market that will enable them to easily identify and FIND YOU across various digital marketing platforms!

About The Dynamic Marketing Communiqué’s
“Thursdays: FYO! Find You Optimization”

Why should you stop thinking SEO and start thinking FYO?

We’re not saying that you should abandon Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Don’t get us wrong, of course, we know this is something very important, especially in today’s digital marketing age.

The internet landscape is vast, and a world of its own. You really need to distinguish yourself and make your brand/company/website known and easily searchable.

Better yet, get to the top of page one for Top Results on Google or any other search engine.

However, what is the purpose of SEO? It’s that customers Find You!

That’s what matters. So, while SEO is one factor of FYO… it really is only one, and we ought not to abandon all the myriad of ways digitally and offline for improving your FYO.

How can we look at this from a different and better perspective?

Let’s say you have it in the bag! You and your team are experts in SEO. Awesome. But did you ever wonder what else you could do to push it further and give your SEO skills a boost?

FYO! Find You Optimization!

You need your target audience to FIND YOU—your brand, product, service, or offer. This is SEO plus other tools that increase visibility online (and offline).

Every Thursday, we publish content on how you can get your target market to find you, beyond the typical “type and search.” There are other things you can do along with your SEO to give your online advertising process a boost.

Try considering other tactics beyond it—WOMO (Word Of Mouth Optimization), RO (Referral Optimization), and “All-Other-Means-Of-Getting-Your-Target-Market-To-Find-You” Optimization (AOMOGYTMTFY, if you’d like a long acronym). 

Part of a great marketing strategy is knowing how to adapt new methods and make use of different types of marketing and promotion that best fit your business goals and which give you the results you want.

Hope you’ve found this week’s insights interesting and helpful.

Stay tuned for next Thursday’s FYO!

Cheers,

Kyle Yu
Head of Marketing
Valens Dynamic Marketing Capabilities
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