A study of personality characteristics in relation to web-based brands

Abstract

Brand personality is one of the most crucial aspects of brand identity that has been of great interest to marketers, therefore virtual, web-based brand personalities have been investigated in relation to human personalities. The Big Five model devised by Costa and McCrae (1986); extraversion, neuroticism, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness, and brand personality scale; sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication and ruggedness as per Aaker (1997), were investigated by means of online questionnaires, distributed amongst University of Malta students. Results were analysed using SPSS in order to research the main hypotheses - personality traits have a positive relationship with brand personalities, particularly to those which are web-based; and brand preference and brand symbolisation are correlated with the consumer‟s self-concept as per Aaker‟s (1997) theory of brand personality. A slight positive relationship was found amongst the brands Asos, Amazon, eBay, Boohoo, Net-a-Porter and their consumers, i.e. sophistication and extraversion are positively correlated, whilst excitement and competence are negatively correlated with neuroticism. In addition, consumers did not feel that their personality is mirrored in their preferred brand, but rather prefer to purchase items/ services online from a particular brand simply because they like it, are accustomed to it, or the trend to make purchases from a particular virtual brand are popular at the time.