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    Impact of Brand

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    9 Ansichten16 Seiten

    Impact of Brand

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    pujarze2
    Impact of Brand

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    THE IMPACT OF BRAND PERSONALITY ON ATTITUDE AND COMMITMENT TOWARDS THE BRAND ‘Laure AMBROISE University of Lyon, France Sarah BEN SLIMAN ESC Tunis, Tunisia Pascal BOURGEAT IPSOS Australia Virginie de BARNIER EDHEC, France Jean-Marc FERRANDI University of Dijon, France ‘Dwight MERUNKA Aix-Marseille University and EUROMED Marseille, France Gilles ROEHRICH, University of Grenoble, France Pierre VALETTE-FLORENCE, University of Grenoble, France ABSTRACT The research proposes to test the impact of brand personality on brand attitude and brand commitment in two product categories. For both categories, brand personality has a direct and large impact on attitude towards the brand. It has a moderate impact on brand commitment for one product category, which is probably the most suited for self-expression purposes. A test of the research model via SEM shows that attitude towards the brand is a mediator between brand personality and brand commitment. Consumer involvement towards the product category moderates relationships between brand personality and brand commitment. Key words: Branding, brand personality, commitment, consumer behavior, attitude, involvement. corresponding author jeanmarcferrandi@free. THE IMPACT OF BRAND PERSONALITY ON ATTITUDE AND COMMITMENT TOWARDS THE BRAND 1. Introduction Recent research has been directed at better understanding both the nature of brand-consumer relationships and the influence these relationships could have on consumer behavior (Fournier, 1998). The concept of brand personality revived by Aaker in 1997 is appealing in that it might influence the strength of brand-consumer relationships and explain consumer buying behavior. Research on brand personality is recent and additional work is yet needed in terms of concept definition and ‘measurement, particularly within different settings or cultures. However, one of the most interesting field of investigation is certainly the assessment and better understanding of the impact of brand personality on key concepts such as attitude towards the brand, brand commitment, brand preference, brand choice or brand loyalty. If brand personality does influence, say, brand loyalty, the concept becomes then very important in terms of brand management and brand performance. From a scientific standpoint, we would need to better understand and model the mechanism through which brand personality might influence brand loyalty. This article is a contribution to that field of research. We apply a brand personality scale to two product categories and to four well-known international brands and study the impact of brand personality on two key consumer behavior constructs, namely attitude and commitment towards the brand. The article is composed of three main parts. We first present the theoretical background, the definition and measurement of brand personality used in this study. We then apply the brand personality scale to competing brands in two product categories (Coke and Pepsi in the cola market, Adidas and Nike in the sportswear market) and show that brand personality profiles are different for competing brands. We finally test the impact of brand personality on consumers” attitude and commitment towards the brands. Consumers’ involvement in the product categories is introduced as a moderating variable. 2. Theoretical Background And Scale Development Brand personality is basically a metaphor stemming from the concept of human personality and early introduced in marketing by practitioners from the advertising field (Martineau, 1958; Plummer, 1984). Generally, human personality traits are defined as “tendencies to show consistent patterns of thoughts, ‘feelings and actions” (Costa and McCrae, 1998) and are understood as psychological cues that determine human action and experiences. Can brands be described in terms of a set of traits or in terms of a limited and stable set of generic terms such as extraversion or openness to new experiences as it is done for human beings? Animism theory considers that humans need to anthropomorphize objects in order to facilitate their interaction with the world. Also, marketing activities of brands such as communications can create brand/consumer relationships, where brands ate perceived, analyzed and considered by consumers as developing behaviors. Thus, consumers may assign personalities to brands and may think of brands as possessing human personality traits (Caprara et al., 2001; Blackston, 1993). Plummer (1984) for example, proposes that a brand might be described on three main dimensions: physical attributes, functional characteristics or benefits associated to consumption and personality traits associated to the brand. The concept of brand personality is considered important as it might hep differentiating brands (McEnally and De Chernatory, 1999) and increase the personal meaning of the brand for the consumer (Levy, 1959; Fournier, 1998). The existence of ‘brand personality traits should help consumers express their self-concept (Ferrandi and Valette- Florence, 2002) and to experiment symbolic benefits from their possession or consumption (Belk, 1988). Theories on self-reinforcement (Grubb and Grathwohl, 1967) and on congruence between self 67 image and brand image (Sirgy, 1982) postulate that consumer behavior is determined by the interaction between the personality of the consumer and the perceptions of the products which he or she prefers, purchases or rejects. It is also along these lines that the concept of brand personality has emerged. Individuals tend to behave in accordance with the image they have from themselves or wish to convey to others. Brands can be thought as a means to communicate these images (Belk, 1988; Schutz-Kleine et al., 1995). Contrary to product attributes which are mainly functional, brand personality tends to have a symbolic function and one of self-expression (Keller, 1993; Phau and Lau, 2001). This connection between brands and personal identity has been conceptualized as a brand- consumer relationship (Fournier, 1998). Researchers have also argued that brand personification allows a better understanding and interpretation of the brand image concept (Dobni and Zinkhan, 1990), although the distinction between brand personality and brand image remains sometimes unclear. For example, Biel (1995) proposes that brand image can be described as having three sub-images (corporate image, image of the product and image of the user) and that the third component can be described in terms of personality. He also claims that brand personality is a “softer characteristic” of brand image, little constrained by the physical attributes of the product. 2.1. Concept Definition Ifbrand personality is a convenient metaphor to describe stable characteristics associated with brands, the concept originally used by advertising agencies had not been defined properly before the work of ‘Aaker (1997). Aaker defines brand personality as “the set of human characteristics associated with a brand”, a definition certainly general since relying on the term “characteristic”. Aaker identifies 42 traits and five brand personality facets: sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication and ruggedness. This model originally developed in the English language and with data collected on American respondents shows personality differences between products, services and retail brands (Bauer et al., 2000; Siguaw et al., 1999). However, it has been argued that the proposed brand personality scale exhibits some dimensions which have no real equivalent in terms of human personality (such as “sophistication” and “ruggedness”) and that some personality traits such as provincial, trendy or glamorous can be better interpreted as social judgments (see Azoulay and Kapferer, 2003 for a severe criticism of the construct validity of Aaker’s measurement scale). Finally and not surprisingly, the scale is not perfectly stable in different cultural contexts (Aaker et al., 2001; Ferrandi et al., 2000). Contrasting with the concept of brand image (a generic term corresponding to the whole set of representations or associations the consumer has with respect to a brand), brand personality should be applicable across product categories. While items used to measure brand image are category-specific and sometimes brand-specific, personality measurement items should have a level of generality allowing them to be applied across categories, brands and cultures. It should also offer the opportunity to transfer meaning from human personality of consumers to brand personality of the brands they prefer, purchase or reject. Therefore, we propose that brand personality be defined as “the set of human personality traits associated with a brand”. In accordance with this definition, we have sought to develop a measure of brand personality using French consumers’ reactions to 8 major brands in 4 product categories. A total of 1089 observations were collected. A classical methodology ‘was applied to develop the scale (item generation, inital screening by consumers and experts, further purification of items through factor analysis and finally confirmatory factor analysis with bootstrap procedure in order to assess scale validity and reliability). The detailed methodology presented elsewhere (Ambroise et al., 2004) led to a first order structure composed of 18 personality traits loading on 7 personality facets (see Tables 1 and 2), 68 Table 1: Structure of the Brand Personality Measurement Scale Loading t CHARMING Nice 757 3771 ‘Warm 808 45.74 Friend! 750 35.60 RELIABLE Reliable 116 29.62 Robust 696 25.21 Solid 721 30.89 CLASSIC Genuine 7m 21.69 ‘Traditional 603 17.80 ELEGANT Stylish m5 28.96 Glamorous 815 36.86, ‘CREATIVE Trendy m7 2931 Innovative 699 26.68 Imaginative 77 37.07 ‘ATTRACTIVE Engaging 164 35.94 Sophisticated 740 30.95 Sensual 786 38.90 ENTHUSIASM Lively 863 27.10 Joyful 614 20.17 Table 2: Reliability and Validity of the Scale Validity indexes RMSEA 0.0703 GFI 0.941 AGFL 0.895 Personality ‘Convergent validity Reliability Facets Pvc (2) Goreskog’s p) CLASSIC 048 0.65 ‘CHARMING 0.60 0.82 ATTRACTIVE 0.58 0.81 ENTHUSIASM 0.60 0.75 CREATIVE 0.53 0.7 ELEGANT 0.59 0.74 RELIABLE 0.51 0.76 3. Brand Personalities — Descriptive Analysis, ‘The measurement of brand personality is relevant if it enables managers to differentiate between ‘competing brands. Biel (1995) argues that functional differences between brands are becoming at best ‘marginal and that any technological advantage is short lived. Hence, brand personality might be one of the limited ways with which a true differentiation might be created in the consumers mind, The differences in brand personalities between brands Pepsi and Coke on the one hand and between brands Nike and Adidas on the other hand were tested through analysis of variance (on factor scores 69 obtained on the 7 personality facets). All data were collected on a sample of students in two major French universities. 175 usable questionnaires were gathered for brand Coke and Pepsi and 167 usable questionnaires for brand Nike and Adidas. Results show that the competing brands exhibit specific personality traits (Table 3). Brand personality profiles of the two sportswear brands and of the two cola brands appear in Figures 1 and 2. An analysis of variance reveals that competing brands have a

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