Brand Personality - 3

Blackston (2000) has argued that to understand brand-customer relationships, it is necessary to consider what a brand thinks of you. To obtain this information you need to think about what the brand would say to you if it were a person.

Whether a brand is a product or a company, the company has to decide what personality traits the brand is to have. One commonly accepted way for creating brand personality is matching the brand personality as close as possible to that of the consumers or to a personality that they admire. Temporal (1999, p 39) defined brand personality creation process with four steps:

Step 1: Define the target audience

Step 2: Find out their needs, expectations and what they like

Step 3: Build a consumer personality profile

Step 4: Create the product personality as close as consumer personality profile

Aaker (1997) has created a framework to describe and measure the brand personality in five core dimensions, which is known as Brand Personality Dimensions or Relationship Basis Model.




• Sincerity (Down-to-earth, family oriented, genuine, old-fashioned)

• Excitement (Spirited, young, up-to-date, outgoing)

• Competence (Accomplished, influential, competent)

• Sophistication (Pretentious, wealthy, condescending)

• Ruggedness (Athletic and outdoorsy)

This framework can used to investigate the current status of a brand and to describe the desired future status of it.