Brand Management.

Brand Personality

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The question

If you handed a few hundred of your customers a list of adjectives — sincere, daring, reliable, glamorous, tough — and asked them to tick the ones that fit you, how close would the result land to the three words in your brand document? Here's the answer worth preparing for. They'll tick fewer words than you did, and the ones that survive won't be your favourites.

The idea

In 1997 Jennifer Aaker — now a professor at Stanford's Graduate School of Business — published Dimensions of Brand Personality in the Journal of Marketing Research, and did the thing the discipline had spent decades talking around. She measured it. Psychologists had long settled on five broad factors for human personality; Aaker asked whether brands resolve the same way. Working from a large pool of trait words, tested against well-known brands with American consumers, she found a structure that held: five dimensions — sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, ruggedness — and a 42-item scale that produces a score on each. Three of the five echo human traits, with sincerity sitting close to agreeableness, excitement to extraversion, competence to conscientiousness. Sophistication and ruggedness have no counterpart, which is the interesting half: brands get to be things people mostly aren't. What the paper hands you isn't vocabulary, it's an instrument. Personality becomes five numbers your customers produce, trackable across years and comparable against the brand sitting next to you. It travels less well than it reads, though. In later cross-cultural work with Verónica Benet-Martínez and Jordi Garolera, ruggedness did not transfer to Japan, where a peacefulness dimension surfaced in its place; Spanish respondents produced a passion dimension of their own and reproduced neither ruggedness nor competence. Treat the five as a working instrument, not scripture.

The framework

01
The five dimensions are an instrument, not an adjective list.
Sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, ruggedness. The point isn't to choose one in a workshop, it's to get a score on all five from people outside the building. Take the trait words that sit under each dimension, put them in a short survey alongside two competitors, and ask customers and non-buyers to rate how well each word describes the brand. You'll get five numbers per brand and a shape you can compare. A brand strategy that can't produce those five numbers is a set of preferences, and preferences don't survive the next marketing director.
02
The gap between the deck and the data.
Run it properly and you end up holding two profiles: the personality you intended and the one you have. The distance between them is the only real finding, and it usually points somewhere unflattering — three years of writing daring, and a brand that scores high on competence and flat on everything else. Resist the instinct to explain the gap away as an awareness problem. Personality is what got through, not what was sent, and a brand read as competent isn't failing. It's succeeding at something it never chose.
03
Pick the dimension you're moving, and accept what it costs.
You can't raise all five, and the ones people admire are frequently in tension — sophistication and ruggedness pull against each other, and so do excitement and competence. Choose one dimension to move over the next year, name the specific traits inside it, then name the score you're willing to let fall. A brand becoming more exciting will usually read as slightly less competent, and if you haven't decided in advance whether that's an acceptable price, you'll panic at the first sign of it and reverse halfway.
04
Change the behaviours — a personality is inferred, never announced.
Personality doesn't change because a document says it has. It's inferred from accumulated evidence of what a brand does: who appears in its advertising, what the packaging feels like in the hand, how its emails read at eight in the morning, what it charges, who it sponsors, how it handles a complaint. Aaker's scale measures the residue of all that. So a change programme is a list of behaviours rather than a list of words — pick three visible things the brand does repeatedly and move them, deliberately, in the direction of the dimension you chose.

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