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Aaker's (1997) brand personality (BP) scale is widely used in research and is an important foundation for the theory of BP. Building on extant critiques of the scale, this article considers the possibility that Aaker's (1997) scale methodology 'creates' the BP that it measures. Using pictures of rocks as stimuli, this article applies the principles of Aaker's methodology to examine the BP of rocks. Rocks are the chosen stimuli as they do not have any obvious commonalities with brands, or have antecedents to BP formation. Findings revealed that each of the rock stimuli has a distinct BP and that the personality is developed from sometimes surprisingly detailed personifications. In consideration of the importance of Aaker's scale in the development of the BP concept, the findings raise questions about its conceptualisation and emphasises the importance of critical examination of the methods used to measure marketing concepts.

Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effects of brand personality dimensions on purchase intention. Furthermore, the brand personality dimensions are compared to study the differences between users and non-users of 12 brands.


Design/methodology/approach
– An estimated 400 undergraduate students participated. They were given a questionnaire divided into two sessions (six brands of think products in one session and six brands of feel products in another session). In the end, 313 participants completed the questionnaire on the six brands of think products, and 320 completed the questionnaire on the six brands of feel products.


Findings
– Multiple regression analysis revealed that Hipness/Vivacity, Success, Sincerity and Sophistication brand personality dimensions are significant predictors of purchase intention. In addition, Domesticity/Emotionality and Professionalism also explain purchase intention but with a negative weight. The results are also broken down into product categories. Compared with non-users of the brands, the users rate the brands higher in all the brand personality dimensions.


Practical implications
– This paper should prove useful to marketing practitioners to understand how Mexican customers perceive their brands and those of their competitors and, therefore, to understand what competitors of these brands can do to increase purchase intention.


Originality/value
– The results found regarding purchase intention are important, as they can be used to identify those personality brand dimensions that appear to be most important in explaining consumer preferences.

This book explores ways to drive and increase a brand's most important property, its equity. Focussing on gender, the author analyses the impact of assigning personalities and characteristics to products and how this can affect the management of brands on a global scale. Using detailed examples, the author argues that brands with low masculine and feminine characteristics have the lowest equity, whilst brands with both high feminine and masculine characteristics are shown to have the strongest equity. Including notions of androgyny in brands, this significant study reveals the different factors which can affect a brand being perceived as either masculine or feminine. Aiming to develop a comprehensive theory and provide practitioners with a guide to increasing the equity of their brands, this controversial and pioneering book lays the foundation for creating a global brand personality model.

We investigated the impact of consistency between consumer personality and brand personality on emotional brand attachment. Participants were 200 undergraduate students at Tsinghua University and we used leading brands in the product category of mobile phone as the survey's stimuli.
The results of a structural equation model suggested that consistency in the personality dimensions of sincere, cool, and young had a significant positive impact on the participants' brand attachment compared with consistency in the dimensions of simple, sensitive,
reliable, and competent. The results provide strong support for the hypothesis that people feel emotionally attached to brands that match their personality or reflect who they believe they are. We also discuss important theoretical and practical implications of these findings.

This study explores the structure of news media brand personality across multiple media outlets including television network news, newspapers, and news magazines. Through a series of exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis procedures with an initial set of 229 personality traits that were reduced to the final set of forty-eight items, we found five brand personality dimensions that can be applicable to news media: Trustworthiness, Dynamism, Sincerity, Sophistication, and Toughness. Practical implications for media brand management are discussed.

The aim of the paper is the alignment of C.G. Jung's (1954) archetypes and Aaker's (1997) brand personality framework in the context of advertising. C.G. Jung's theories had a tremendous impact on psychology. David Aaker and his daughter Jennifer are seen by many as the branding gurus. Despite the fact that both frameworks refer to persons/personalities there is no publication linking the two frameworks. Our research tried to fill this gap by developing a joint framework combining Jung's and Aaker's attributes and apply it by analyzing two distinctively different TV commercials from Asian hotel chains. A total of 102 Executive MBA students had to watch both TV commercials and then conduct an Archetype (C.G. Jung) Indicator test and rate Brand Personality (Aaker) traits of the two commercials. Results show that there is common ground. This has implications for advertisers who may want to specify an archetype and related personality attributes for their promotional campaigns. Game changers in the hospitality sector may want to be seen as Outlaw whereas established hotel chains may position themselves as Lover with personality attributes such as welcoming, charming, and embraced.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate the predicting roles of extension naming strategies and categorical fit on the transfer of brand personality from a parent brand to its extension brand. Extension naming strategies include direct and indirect naming, while categorical fit is the similarity between an extended product and its parent brand's cognitive category. Further, the interaction effect and the relative effectiveness of various combinations of the two predictors when determining brand personality transfer are also explored.Design/methodology/approachA 2×2 factorial between‐subject experimental design with one covariate is used to test the proposed hypotheses. The experiment involves 242 participants from a university in Taiwan.FindingsThe findings show that consumers perceive higher brand personality transfer when a direct naming strategy is applied or when the parent brand extends to a high perceived fit product. The former is the dominant predictor of brand personality transfer. There also exists an interaction effect between extension naming strategies and categorical fit. Specifically, consumers perceive the highest brand personality transfer when a direct naming strategy is applied for a high fit extended product. Moreover, the use of a direct naming strategy for an extended product with a low categorical fit still leads to a higher degree of parent brand personality than both the other cases in which an indirect naming strategy is applied for either high or low fit extended products. Furthermore, irrespective of the degree of categorical fit, the transfer of brand personality is low when an indirect naming strategy is applied.Originality/valueThe current research is pioneer work in identifying the determinants of brand personality transfer. It also notes the interaction effect and the relative effectiveness of the determinants.

Zahlreiche Studien haben den Einfluss von Markeneigenschaften auf die Markenerweiterbarkeit (d.h., das Ausmass, zu dem eine Marke für Markenerweiterungen genutzt werden kann, die in positiven Ergebnissen für die Marke resultieren) untersucht. Jedoch sind trotz der hohen Relevanz der Markenpersönlichkeit für das Markenimage bisher keine Erkenntnisse bezüglich des Einflusses der Markenpersönlichkeit auf die Markenerweiterbarkeit verfügbar. Aufbauend auf bestehendem Wissen zur Verarbeitungsflüssigkeit (processing fluency) schlägt diese Dissertation vor, dass die Persönlichkeit von Marken die Flüssigkeit, mit der Markenerweiterungen verarbeitet werden, beeinflusst und sich demnach auf die Ergebnisse von Markenerweiterungen auswirkt. Entsprechende Hypothesen werden in einer korrelativen Studie und fünf experimentellen Studien empirisch getestet, welche die Ergebnisse von Markenerweiterungen von aktiven und verantwortungsvollen Marken nach dem Markenpersönlichkeitsverständnis von Geuens, Weijters und De Wulf (2009) vergleichen. Der vermutete Einfluss der Markenpersönlichkeit auf die Ergebnisse von Markenerweiterungen über die Verarbeitungsflüssigkeit konnte nicht nachgewiesen werden. Während die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass die Verarbeitungsflüssigkeit positiv mit der Evaluation von Markenerweiterungen zusammenhängt, weisen sie nicht darauf hin, dass die Flüssigkeit, mit der Markenerweiterungen verarbeitet werden, von der Markenpersönlichkeit abhängt. Jedoch deuten beobachtete Unterschiede in Evaluationen von Markenerweiterungen und im Einfluss von Markenerweiterungen auf die Muttermarke auf die allgemeine Relevanz der Markenpersönlichkeit für die Markenerweiterbarkeit hin. So unterschieden sich die Evaluationen von Markenerweiterungen von aktiven und verantwortungsvollen Marken in Studie 4 positiv und marginal signifikant und in Studie 6 negativ und marginal signifikant. Weiterhin wurde in Studie 3 ein positiver

AbstractThis research examines how brand personality (excitement) and logo size used in product design (big versus small) interacts in affecting consumer brand evaluation. We first demonstrate that combining a big logo and a high‐excitement brand (versus a small logo combined with a high‐excitement brand) leads to high processing fluency, further resulting in more favourable brand evaluation (Study 1). We then determine the consumption situation as a moderator of such an interaction effect: the influence of the big logo and high‐excitement‐brand combination on brand evaluation is significantly weakened in a private consumption situation (a T‐shirt worn at home) compared to a public consumption situation (a T‐shirt worn outside, Study 2a), and becomes insignificant for a private product category (slippers, Study 2b).

Brand personality has become an increasingly important concept within brand theory and factor based research is the method most widely used in the study of brand personality. There have been critiques of some aspects of early factor models, leading to an evolution and improvement in the methods used in factor model development. However, several problems remain which have yet to be addressed, and these raise questions about what exactly the factor models are measuring. This paper introduces and explains the problems of category confusions, domain meaning shifts, and the descriptor selection problem. In doing so, the paper extends existing critiques of the methods in brand personality factor research, and raises questions about the validity of current factor based models. The paper concludes with a recommendation that brand personality researchers re-evaluate their models and the brand personality concept, and that brand personality returns to its roots in qualitative projective methods.

AbstractBrand personality (human‐like characteristics of a brand) has been a popular topic in the marketing literature for over 50 years. However, there is a lack of consumer‐focused studies investigating what factors shape perceptions of brand personality. To address this gap, the purpose of the current study is to understand how consumers form their perceptions of the different dimensions of brand personality identified in Aaker's scale (sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication and ruggedness), and what product or brand characteristics influence these perceptions. Sixty‐six interviews were conducted with graduate students, who were asked to discuss which brands reflected the specific dimensions of brand personality in Aaker's scale. As a result, we identify the kinds of brands consumers perceive as typical for each personality dimension, discover their common characteristics and explain the reasons why some brands are strongly associated with a particular dimension and some are not. Our findings indicate that specific brand personality dimensions are associated with particular product categories. However, brands mentioned as strong on respective personality dimensions share commonalities beyond just a product category. For instance, sincere brands share family‐related associations and high morals, exciting brands offer consumers the opportunity to experience exciting feelings and are related to special 'exciting' occasions, competent brands are mostly associated with expertise and quality, sophisticated brands are usually of feminine nature, whereas rugged brands are of masculine nature. Moreover, we find that brands which consumers perceive as lacking on a particular personality dimension also share common attributes.Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.