Strategic Framework for Effective Brand Personality Building

Research in Progress | August 2021

Introduction

The concept of brand personality has received tremendous attention in branding praxis and academic research. Groundbreaking work has been conducted by Jennifer Aaker who developed the brand personality construct and identified the number and nature of its dimensions. Other streams of research in marketing and consumer psychology have investigated the mechanisms by which human-like characteristics are transferred to a brand and have identified for which value proposition a certain brand personality may be most effective. In addition, research on brand concepts and consumers’ involvement in the decision making process provides valuable insights on the context – exterior factors that determine which brand personality should be built for the brand.

In this proposed strategic framework I compile findings from various streams of research on marketing, branding, and consumer psychology to allow for a better understanding of strategic brand personality building. It is a relating and integrating framework that synthesizes, amalgamates, and harmonizes important concepts, mechanisms, and contexts. It provides an architectural plan, to say it in the metaphorical term suggested by McInnis (2011), that reveals novel insights on the process of building brand personalities.

Brand Personality and Endorsement Research

The brand personality concept describes broad categories of brand personality and provides a corresponding set of human traits that make up that brand personality. There is firm belief in the domain of brand personality research that the personality of a brand can be described as a set of human-like characteristics. Scientific research has shown that indeed the personality of a brand constitutes five dimensions, similar to the big five personality traits of human beings (Aaker 1997), and that three of these five dimensions describing a brand personality relate to the dimensions describing a human personality.

The research stream on endorsement advertising demonstrates that advertising can transfer traits from an endorser (human being) to a brand, configurating a certain brand image perceived by consumers. Endorsement research i) explains how (this is by which underlying psychological construct a certain set of human traits is transferred to a brand) and ii) reveals in which context (this is the product category a brand competes in) each strategy (the set of human traits that should be transferred) is most effective. The combination of findings in both research fields allow us to deduce in which situation a particular set of traits can effectively be transferred to compose the corresponding brand personality.

Framework for Effective Brand Personality Building

It has been argued that traditional product categories are not the most relevant variables to determine effective advertising strategy anymore (Roozen and Claeys, 2010). Hence, I suggest to use the customer value proposition as a starting point to determine effective brand personality strategy. Payne, Frow and Eggert (2017) define customer value proposition as “a strategic tool facilitating communication of an organization’s ability to share resources and offer a superior value package to targeted customers”. Other concepts that may be usable as a starting point would be a brand’s positioning statement or its unique selling proposition (Payne et. al, 2017). For this framework I suggest to use the four value proposition categories proposed by Schimmelpfennig and Hunt (2020) that allow to identify the corresponding endorsement advertising strategy: “provide best performance”, “enable consumer to build a persona”, “craft unique experience”, and “create positive effect in a nominal decision”. These four categories were developed based on an extensive analysis of studies that investigate effective endorsement strategy. In their work Schimmelpfennig and Hunt (2020) could show that communication campaigns that seek to transfer human traits to a product or brand can be categorized in one of these four broad categories.