Relationship between brand personality and the personality of consumers, and its application to corporate branding strategy

Many consumers enjoy the challenge of purchasing a brand that matches well with
their own values and personalities (for example, Ko et al., 2008; Ko et al., 2006).
Therefore, the personalities of consumers can impact on the final selection of a brand
and its brand personality in two ways: first, the consumers may incline to purchase a
brand or a product that reflects their own personalities; second, consumers tend to choose
a company that has similar brand personalities to those brands that are being promoted.
Therefore, the objectives of this study are following:
1. Is there any empirical relationship between a consumer’s personality and the personality
of a brand that he or she chooses?
2. Can a corporate brand be differentiated by the brand personality?
In short, consumers are more likely to hold favorable attitudes towards those brands
that match their own personality and will most probably purchase those brands matching
well with their personality. For example, Matzler et al. (2006) found that extraversion
and openness were positively related to hedonic product value; and that the personality
traits directly (openness) and indirectly (extraversion, via hedonic value) influenced brand
effects, which in turn droved attitudinal and purchase loyalty. Based on the above
discussion, the following hypotheses are proposed:
Hypothesis 1: the personality of a consumer is related to the brand personality of a product/corporate that he/she purchases.
Kuksov (2007) and Wernerfelt (1990) argued that brands as a symbolic language
allowed consumers to communicate their types to each other and postulated that
consumers had a certain value of communicating their types to each other. Therefore,
how brand meanings are established, and how a firm communicate with consumers about
the meanings of the brand are interesting topics for research (for example, Escalas and
Bettman, 2005; McCracken, 1989; Moon, 2007). Hence, the following hypothesis is
proposed:
Hypothesis 2: A corporate brand identity is differentiated by the brand personality. And
there are significant differences among companies.
A questionnaire was developed for collecting empirical measures of the Big-Five
personality traits and brand personality variables. A survey was conducted to the online
access panel members through the Internet during December 2007 in Korea. In total, 500
respondents completed the questionnaire, and considered as useable.
Personality constructs were measured using the Five-factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) scale
and a total of 30 items were actually utilized. Brand personality was measured using the
five-dimension scale developed by Aaker (1997). A total of 17 items were actually
utilized. The seven-point Likert-type scale was the format of responses, for example, from
1 indicating strongly disagreed to 7 for strongly agreed.
The Analysis of Moment Structures (AMOS) was used for an empirical testing of the
model, and the Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) was applied to estimate numerical
values for the components in the model. To diagnose the presence of distribution
problems in the data and to gauge their effects on the parameter estimates, bootstapping
method was used.
The results of the hypothesis-1 test empirically show that there exit certain causality
relationship between a consumer’s personality and the brand personality of the consumer’s
choice. Thus, the consumer’s personality has an impact on consumer’s final selection of a
brand that has a brand personality matches well with their own personalities. In other
words, the consumers are inclined to purchase a brand that reflects their own
personalities and tend to choose a company that has similar brand personalities to those
of the brand being promoted. The results of this study further suggest that certain dimensions of the brand
personality cause consumers to have preference to certain (corporate) brands. For example,
the conscientiousness, neuroticism, and extraversion of the consumer personality have
positively related to a selection of “ruggedness” characteristics of the brand personality.
Consumers who possess that personality dimension seek for matching with certain brand
personality dimensions.
Results of the hypothesis-2 test show that the average “ruggedness” attributes of the
brand personality differ significantly among Korean automobile manufacturers. However,
the result of ANOVA also indicates that there are no significant differences in the mean
values among manufacturers for the “sophistication,” “excitement,” “competence” and
“sincerity” attributes of the corporate brand personality. The tight link between what a
firm is and its corporate brand means that there is far less room for marketing
communications than there is with products and brands. Consequently, successful
corporate brand strategies must position the organization within the boundaries of what is
acceptable, while at the same time differentiating the organization from its competitors.