Brand personality and human personality: Findings from ratings of familiar Croatian brands

Abstract

The present article focuses on two main problems: determining the factor structure of personality ratings of familiar Croatian brands and determining how different levels of data aggregation can affect the dimensionality and the nature of extracted factors. Following Aaker's seminal study [Aaker, J. Dimensions of brand personality. Journal of Marketing Research 1997; 24: 347–356], which aims to identify the dimensions of brand personality, this study attempts to relate brand personality to personality dimensions derived from the natural language. In the first study, a sample of 55 students rate the familiarity of 111 brands represented in the categories of “a Croatian creation” and “Croatian quality”. Subsequently, ten brands are selected on the basis of mean familiarity and representation in various product categories (food, beverages, medicine and cleaning products). In the second study, an exhaustive Croatian taxonomy of personality descriptors [Mlačić B, Ostendorf F. Taxonomy and Structure of Croatian Personality-descriptive Adjectives. European Journal of Personality 2005; 19: 117–152] serves as a basis for the construction of a 90-item inventory that covers the 45 facets from the AB5C model [Goldberg LR. International Personality Item Pool. A Scientific Collaboratory for the Development of Advanced Measures of Personality and Other Individual Differences. 6 June 2005. 20 April 2005. http://ipip.ori.org/ipip/]. A large sample of students (267) rate the personality of the ten selected brands using the 90-item inventory. The results of exploratory factor analyses of brand personality are discussed in respect of previous research, the lexical approach, and the possible effects of different levels of data aggregation on the dimensionality of the obtained factor structure.