The Impact of Brand Personality Dimensions on Brand Association and Brand Attractiveness: The Case Study of Kfc in Thailand

ABSTRACT Brand personality refers to human personality traits associated with a brand. The results of this study conducted in Thailand reveal that, for the fast-food brand KFC, the brand personality dimension of competence has more influence on brand association and brand attractiveness than the other four dimensions (sincerity, excitement, sophistication, and ruggedness). In addition, brand association appears to partially mediate the influence of the competence dimension of brand personality on brand attractiveness. Implications and future study directions conclude the study report. (ProQuest: . denotes formula omitted.) INTRODUCTION For a fast-food restaurant which is defined as a "branded convenience food" (Mohammad, Barker and Kandampully 2005, p. 97), a brand personality is thought to be an essential part of this business. An extensive review of literature (e.g., Jones, Hiller, Shears and Clarke-Hill 2002; Murase and Bojanic 2004) indicates that brand personality has become an important aspect of stability and growth of a fast-food restaurant. Traditionally, a fast-food restaurant commonly used a pricing strategy to compete in the market (Mohammad, Barker and Kandampully 2005). Current thinking is that such strategy alone can be easily imitated by competitors and, therefore, could be less effective in creating a sustainable competitive advantage for a fastfood restaurant. Unlike a price reduction strategy, brand personality has been acknowledged by many service marketing researchers to have a great influence on consumer behaviors in various aspects such as consumer preference and usage (Sirgy 1982; Batra, Lehmann and Singh 1993; Simoes and Dibb 2001). Therefore, creating a strong and favorable brand personality is likely to be a better way for a fast-food restaurant to differentiate itself from the competitors in the long run. Brand personality has attracted interests from marketing researchers for several decades (RojasMendez, Erenchun-Podlech and Silva-Olave 2004). Initial research in brand personality examined different brands in several product categories and demonstrated that consumers perceived brands in terms of five orthogonal personality dimensions: sincerity (e.g., Hallmark), competence (e.g., The Wall Street Journal), excitement (e.g., MTV), sophistication (e.g., Guess), and ruggedness (e.g., Malboro; Monga and Lau-Gesk 2007). This stream of research, however, focused on brands predominantly characterized by one single dimension of brand personality (Monga and Lau-Gesk 2007) although a brand may simultaneously possess multiple dimensions of brand personality. Research examining the relative impact of each dimension of brand personality is scant and one goal of the current research is thus to fill in this gap. Furthermore, from a managerial perspective, the current research also extends brand personality research to another fast-growing area, service marketing for fast-food restaurants. Specifically, the current study attempts to investigate the impact of different brand personality dimensions on two important outcome variables: brand association and brand attractiveness. These two variables are thought to reflect consumer's cognitive and affective responses, respectively. In addition, this study also attempts to examine whether brand association would mediate the influence of brand personality dimensions on brand attractiveness. Despite an increasing interest in brand personality research, little work has been conducted to examine the impact of brand personality dimensions in Asia (Polyorat, Khantuwan, Jaratmetakul and Boonnon 2008). The scarcity of research on this topic in an Asian context exists in spite of the extensive debate over globalization versus localization of marketing and advertising practice (Levitt 1983). A growth of the global marketing strategy in general (Onkvisit and Shaw 1999) and the cross-cultural use of global brands in particular (Alden, Steenkamp and Batra 1999) make this gap in the literature even more pronounced. …