Brand Personality - 2

Aaker (1997) mentioned that in addition to personality characteristics, brand personality includes demographic characteristics such as gender, age and class. Similar to personality characteristics, these demographic characteristics also are inferred directly from the brand’s user imagery, employees, or product endorsers and indirectly from other brand associations. For example, driven by distinct user imagery, Virginia Slims tends to be thought of as feminine, whereas Marlboro tends to be perceived as masculine. Apple is considered to be young, and IBM is considered to be older (Aaker, 1996). On the basis of their different pricing strategies, Saks Fifth Avenue is perceived as upper class, whereas Kmart is perceived as blue collar (Aaker, 1997).

Temporal (1999) mentioned about a consumer research, where sample consumers were asked to comment about how they feel about two companies.

When asked the question: “If these two companies were people, how would you describe them?” their replies were:




These two companies are actually competitors in a service industry. Like 95% of the sample consumers you would choose Company B as your friend if you were asked to choose one of them.

This research shows that consumers tend to prefer brands that fit in with their self-concept. Consumers tend to like personalities that are similar to theirs or to those whom they admire. An effective brand personality building strategy is to create the brand personality as close as to the target consumers’ personalities. The closer the brand personality to consumer personality, the greater will be the willingness to buy the brand and the deeper the loyalty.