Make Friends with Customers What Should a Marketer Know About Brand Personality Theory and Practice

Make friends with customers

What should a marketer know about brand personality theory and practice

1. What is brand personality?

1.1 The background of brand personality.

The first time when brand personality was mentioned was in 1955 by David Ogilvy (Ogilvy, 1955) when he had a lecture to American Associate of advertising Agencies. This concept comes out in the specifically background. As the developing of the technology, the produce with the same quality become much than before. Producers need a new method to identify themselves from each other. On the other hand, customers want to identify themselves from each other too. They need a method to express their personality. So brand personality is on the table with the responsibility of identify produces and satisfy the emotional and personal require of customers.

1.2 The history of the developing of brand personality

As the first mention (Ogilvy, 1955) from now is fifty years already. In these fifty years people never stop to reach brand personality and their reaches a mainly on three aspect. The first one is on the conception level. They defined brand personality with description (Allen. Olson, 1958), dimensionality (Aaker, 1997), and relationship (Susan Fourneir, 1998). The second one is on reach level. And it can be separate to qualitative reach(Levy, 1985; Plummer, 1985) and quantitative reach (Davil Aaker，1997; Bill Merrrilees, 1999; Dale Miller, 2001; Shengbing Huang. Taihong Lu, 2003). The last one is on how to manage brand personality. Someone think it’s the tool that brand express themselves to customer (King, 1989), someone think it just the information created by AD (Lannon. Cooper, 1983), and someone think it’s one of the determinants of build a brand (Keller, 1989; Aaker, 1991; Biel, 1993).(Yanhui Zhao, 2004)

1.3 what is the role of brand personality in build a brand

According to Kevin Lane Keller, brand personality is just one attribute of brand imagine (appendix 1). The user/usage image is one attribute of brand imagine. These two attribute can just solicitation the mental Attribution from customer. And user/usage image is the material part as well as the brand personality is the abstractive part,

2. Why marketer need brand personality.

Marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communication and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.(AMA,2004). So all the Marketing behavior should consider customer, or called customer based.

2.1 brand personality for strategic planning

There are three level in strategic planning: corporate level, strategic business unit (SBU) level and functional level (Kotler et al. 2006). We build brand personality from customer up, can helps market understand customer better. So, market can make a suitable mission and vision in corporate level, get a better business definition in SBU level and choose the right decision in functional level. Because of these, market can satisfy customer better and avoid some vicious competition like competition of galloping price.

2.2 brand personality for customer behavior

“Marketers must learn and clearly understand the consumer’s feelings, habits, motivations, insecurities, prejudices, and desires. They must understand how their company’s brand fits into a consumer’s life and how they might respond to different branding messages.”(Larson, 2003). Market built brand personality from customer up can do a better job to satisfy customer’s emotional require, so that a closer relationship will be build with customers.

2.3 brand personality for CBBE

CBBE (Customer-Based Brand Equity) is a important concept because almost every markets know strong brands are important but not always know how to build one. And CBBE model make this easier and executable. The basic premise of CBBE is:

Power of a brand resides in the mind of customers.

Challenge is to ensure customer have the right types of experiences with products & services and their marketing programs to create the right brand knowledge structures: thought, feeling, image, perception and attitude. ( Keller, 2006)

So, as the brand personality is just the very thing that thought, feeling, image, perception and attitude in customers’ mind,