Faculty Research Representing Brand and Category Personality with Circumplex Models

Consumers often anthropomorphize brands by endowing them with personality traits, and marketers often create or reinforce these perceptions by their brand positioning. Brand personality traits provide symbolic meaning or emotional value that can contribute to consumers’ brand preferences and can be more enduring than functional attributes. Successfully positioning a brand’s personality within a product category requires measurement models that are able to disentangle a brand’s unique personality traits from those traits that are common to all brands in the product category. This paper proposes a circumplex model that separates the two by using category–level and brand–level random effects. Circumplex models provide a parsimonious representation of personality traits that are characterized by similarity and polarity among personality domains. These models locate traits around a circle such that neighboring traits in a personality domain are in opposition to domains on the other side of the circle. Unlike factor models, the circumplex explicitly captures tradeoffs among personality domains. In an empirical study of 30 brands in three product categories, we detected considerable evidence that category perceptions contribute to the perceptions of brands within the category. The study found three personality domains:“Suave” and “Sensible” are in opposition on a bipolar dimension, and “Capable” is measured on a unipolar dimension. These personality dimensions are related to antecedents such as interest in the category and familiarity with the brand, and the domains, in turn, are related to the consumer’s affect towards the brands. Brand Management, Brand Personality, Circumplex Correlation, Psychological Measurement, Hierarchical Bayes Models