Anyone who has owned or works for a concierge business knows the difficulties that come with branding your company and services. You want to be perceived as sophisticated and elegant without coming off as snobbish and arrogant, yet both sides of the equation are almost interchangeably used in our society. 

Before we rebranded into a company that exclusively works with concierge and luxury businesses, we were a web development company who has worked with a couple of concierge businesses. When we were designing the personalized digital experience for those concierge businesses we ended up stumbling upon the exact issues that we discussed earlier. All of our website blueprints and brand designs either came off as not professional enough, by which we would make it more sophisticated and elegant, or too arrogant, by which we would make it more relatable. At this point the issue should be obvious enough.

After working with a couple more clients and achieving good results, we have found a common characteristic amongst all of our successful concierge projects. Almost every concierge brand that was happy with our work was able to identify their brand persona before working on their website, and those businesses who weren’t 100% satisfied came to us without being able to tell us what this brand persona was. This ultimately came down to being able to align your brand with your market. Imagine if you were told to perform a song for a crowd of people without having been told what type of music the crowd was expecting. If you performed a rap  song for a classical venue or a classical song for a rap venue, issues are bound to come up. 

Now it might seem easy for concierge businesses to align a brand personality to their market, after all there are only  5 brand personalities that exist and only the sophisticated personality fits the concierge industry. But, this is exactly how many businesses go about the rebranding journey of lifetime. Take for example the comparison between Apple/Gucci and Gucci/Louis Vuitton . Under the previous statement the brand personality of Apple, Louis Vuitton, and Gucci should be under the same sophistication brand personality since they all offer luxury products. But when we try to interchange their websites, put the products of one site onto another and vice versa, we can see that the Louis Vuitton website and the Gucci website are interchangeable while the Apple website and the Gucci website are not. 

What does this mean for brand personality though? Why do some sophisticated brands interchange well with others and some don’t? This is where our research with concierge businesses come into play. Business brands are separated into 5 categories, then further categorized into smaller subset personas based on the products that they are offering and markets that they are competing in. For instance Apple is branded on sophistication while selling mobile products while Gucci and Louis Vuitton is branded on selling fashion products. These subsets are completely separate from the categorization of the 5 main brand personalities and could be analyzed separately. For instance the market for mobile devices includes all of the 5 brand personality types and so does the market for fashion products. 

So when we define the concierge business brand persona, we can categorize it under sophistication, but subsets into small categories, specifically the different types of markets that each type of concierge business targets. Some examples include personal concierge, medical concierge, travel concierge, and business concierge to name a few. From there your unique brand persona is then designed based on the market you are in and also the personality group you fall under.