Trajectories of Brand Personality Research since the New Millennium: A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Although brand personality as a research construct has been gaining immense consideration since the inception of the new millennium, the nature of research conducted over the years has heavily converged on a few specific avenues, such as scale validity across cultures and the generalizability across diverse sectoral contexts. The bibliometric analysis undertaken in the present review maps the global trajectories of brand personality research using the Scopus database. The current review analyses the entailed co-citation analysis based on cited references and cited sources, bibliographic coupling analysis based on authors and countries, and co-occurrence analysis based on author keywords. The review explains how the congruence between consumer personality and brand personality is yet to be explored further. The associated concepts of brand animism and anthropomorphism have not been sufficiently addressed when discussing brand personality. The review further advances that the applications of brand personality have been heavily concentrated in only a few specific brand categories, namely, travel and tourism, and Islamic marketing. The review shall engender pertinent research avenues that can be justified by the theoretical and managerial implications that would emanate from the study.