Brand Personality.

Based on the premise that brands can have personalities in much

the same way as humans, Brand Personality describes brands in terms of
human characteristics. Brand personality is seen as a valuable factor in
increasing brand engagement and brand attachment, in much the same
way as people relate and bind to other people. Much of the work in the
area of brand personality is based on translated theories of human
personality and using similar measures of personality attributes and
factors.
 Brand Personality framework

Brand
Personality
Dimensions  
of Jennifer
Aaker

The Brand Personality Dimensions is a framework to describe and measure the

'personality" of a brand in five core dimensions, each divided into a set of facets.

It is an easy to understand model to describe the profile of a brand using an analogy

with a human being. 

The five core dimensions and their facets are:

• Sincerity (down-to-earth, honest, wholesome, cheerful)
• Excitement (daring, spirited, imaginative, up-to-date)
• Competence (reliable, intelligent, successful)
• Sophistication (upper class, charming)
• Ruggedness (outdoorsy, tough)

Each facet is in turn measured by a set of traits. The trait measures are taken using a
five-point scale (1= not at all descriptive, 5=extremely descriptive) rating the extent to
which each trait describes the specific brand of interest.

The traits belonging to each of the facets are:

• Down-to-earth (down-to-earth, family-oriented, small-town)

• Honest (honest, sincere, real)
• Wholesome (wholesome, original)
• Cheerful (cheerful, sentimental, friendly)
• Daring (daring, trendy, exciting)
• Spirited (spirited, cool, young)
• Imaginative (imaginative, unique)
• Up-to-date (up-to-date, independent, contemporary)
• Reliable (reliable, hard working, secure)
• Intelligent (intelligent, technical, corporate)
• Successful (successful, leader, confident)
• Upper class (upper class, glamorous, good looking)
• Charming (charming, feminine, smooth)
• Outdoorsy (outdoorsy, masculine, Western)
• Tough (tough, rugged)

What Personality Reveals about a Brand

Great brand personalities are multi-dimensional. As with humans,

brand personality has both depth and multiple facets … and reveals four
basic qualities of the brand.
1. Demonstrates a Brand’s Passion and Expertise … Defining the Brand’s
Ultimate Purpose and Differentiating It from the Competitive Set.

2. Creates an Affinity with Targeted Customer Segments … Touching

and Energizing their Motivations.

3. Projects the Brand’s Core Values and Beliefs … Describing How

Customer’s can Expect to be Treated.

4. Communicates an Over-Arching Tone, Style, and Attitude about the

Brand’s Experience and Customer Interactions.

BRAND PERSONIFICATION
The most common technique for eliciting the composition of the
brand is personification. "If the brand were a person, what type of
person would it be...?"

This is known as a projection. It is often far easier to talk about

something we have words and images for, such as people or cars, so by
describing the brand as a person, it is easier to articulate what the brand
is about. Projection techniques are used frequently in qualitative brand
research to get at the essence of brand make-up. 

Although personification is very effective at describing what the brand

is, it is far more difficult to say this is what the brand should be, or
whether one particular brand personality will be more successful than
an alternative. It is possible to try and match personality with the target
audience (eg Budweiser), to make the personality one that buyers aspire
to in some way (eg Gucci), or to use a completely different personality
(Werthers). Most common is a building a matching or aspiring
personality type for a brand.

An alternative to personification is to describe the brand as a story or a

scene. "Give me a story or scene that captures the essence of...?" This can
be harder to do and similar types of information will come out, but
sometimes the imagery is more vivid and you can ask people if they
want to be part of the scene or story they are describing. This inclusion
reflects how an individual responds to the brand. 

Connected with the ideas of brand personality and personification, a

brand has and represents a certain set of values. Orange, one of the most
successful brands of the 1990s, was started with a brand that was set up
to encapsulate a set of values. By contrast its main competitor Vodafone
was set up as a brand that represented a certain set of functional
benefits.

Self and self- image

A person's self image is the mental picture, generally of a kind
that is quite resistant to change, that depicts not only details that are
potentially available to objective investigation by others (height, weight,
hair colour, sex, I.Q. score, etc.), but also items that have been learned by
that person about himself or herself, either from personal experiences or
by internalizing the judgments of others. A simple definition of a
person's self image is their answer to this question - "What do you
believe people think about you?" A more technical term for self image
that is commonly used by social and cognitive psychologists is self-
schema. Like any schema, self-schemas store information and influence
the way we think and remember. For example, research indicates that
information which refers to the self is preferentially encoded and
recalled in memory tests, a phenomenon known as "Self-Referential
Encoding"

Poor self image

Poor self image may be the result of accumulated criticisms that

the person collected as a child which have led to damaging his own
view of himself. Children in particular are vulnerable to accepting
negative judgments from authority figures because they have yet to
develop competency in evaluating such reports.
What is not known to others

It should be noted that some information about an individual is

not directly available to others, and that information may be very
pertinent to the formation of an accurate and well functioning self
image. For instance, only the individual may know whether certain of
his or her acts were malicious or benevolent in intent. Only individuals
know whether in their internal experience they are masculine or
feminine, good or bad and so on.

Individuals often form a negative self image as a result of physicalities

affecting themselves, such as alcoholic parents or other unstable
environments, and the use of drugs to unintentionally hurt themselves.