Use of personality perspective in branding!

An expression of the fundamental core values and characteristics of a brand described and experienced as human personality traits like friendly, intelligent, innovative etc. It is an expression of the relationship between the consumer and the brand. The traditional marketing approach had lost its effect. Marketing professionals had become a bit too much mechanical, executing the accepted rules and processes of brand building, marketing communication and product innovation.

The consumers at the getting end grew tired of the traditional approach of push marketing. They literally didn’t buy it to any further extent. Whose effects are now as: declining brand loyalty, declining market share, more room for out-of-the-box ideas, no-brand products. This gave rise to new techniques like guerrilla marketing, pull marketing, experience marketing, niche marketing.

Over the past few years the mental approach of companies has progressively evolved in several stages:

• product based

• sales based

• market based

• marketing based Inspire Customer Loyalty

• Identity based

Lastly now come an era of Personality based branding according to which just like human beings all the brands have personality. Whether it is shallow and instrumental or deep, emotionally charged and carefully managed. Personality is the concept to give life to a brand, to manage ‘identity and image’, to create likeability.

The concept of brand personality combines inside-out and outside-in; identity and image. A personality has its roots in the identity but is strongly externally focused. It is not “be who you are”. Personality is: Become who you should be. The brand personality should be clearly defined; like one would describe the personality of a real person. Obviously this does not apply to every brand. One can choose other verbal concepts to express the brand personality. It is most important to define a brand personality without using any certified jargon.How to Build a Unique Brand

Based on the trait theory, researchers have concluded that there are five stable personality dimensions, also called the “Big Five” human personality dimensions “Big Five” human personality dimensions are Extraversion/introversion, Agreeableness, Consciousness, Emotional stability, and Culture. Based on these human personality dimensions, Jennifer Aaker (1997) identifies the new “Big Five” dimensions related to brands. These are Sincerity, Excitement, Competence, Sophistication, and Ruggedness.

Brand personalities are created in different ways and with different tools. However, the creation always involves active communications on the side of the firm: the personality has to be disseminated to be alive. Advertising is heavily used in this process of personality creation. One of the advantages of brand personalities are that based on their distinctive personalities, consumers are able to differentiate between brands. Another advantage is that the consumer can interpret the brand’s image in such a way that it is personally more meaningful. Brand personality encourages more active processing on the part of the consumer. Thus, the consumer puts more effort in creating and using the brand personality.