How to Build a Brand as Personality?

With advancing technology and sufficient investment, competitors can emulate and surpass the functional advantage of a leading brand. One way to sustain a brand’s uniqueness is through enrobing it with emotional values, which users sometimes welcome beyond the brand’s functional utility. Customers rarely undertake a thorough review of a brand to identify its emotional values, as can be appreciated from the perceptual processes. By using the metaphor of the brand as a personality, sometimes manifested through a celebrity in brand advertisement, customers find it much easier to appreciate the emotional values of the brand.

Thus, brand personality is “the set of human personality trains that are both applicate to and relevant for brands”.

Furthermore, with experience of the brand, customers develop their views about the brand, and to help them express this they personify brands. A good example of the way consumers personily brands based on their opinions about their emotional values.

A brand’s emotional values are also inferred from its design and packaging, along with other marketer controlled clues such as pricing and the type of outlet selling the brands, people from impressions according to the types of people using the brand and this is less easy for the marketer to control.

This interpretation of the brand has given rise to a considerable amount of research into brands as symbolic devices with personalities that users welcome. When choosing between competing brands customers assess the fit between the personalities of competing brands and personality they wish to project.

Freling and Forbes showed, a strong, favourable brand personality is more likely to result in both favorable product evaluations and brand associations.

According to the situation they are in, this may be:

• The self they believe they are (for example the brands of clothing selected by a manager for daily wear in the office);
• The self they desire to be (for example the brand of suit worn by young graduates going for interviews immediately after completing their degree);
• The situational self (for example the brands of clothing worn by a young man who is to meet for the first time the parents of his fiance); and
• The rejected self (for example rejecting an automotive brand because the consumer perceives it as being environmentally unkind).

Therefore, when seeking to communicate the emotional values of the brand it is important to understand the emotional role potential customers expect of the brand.

This Article is taken from From Brand Vision to Brand Evaluation

Written by Arshad. A