Brand as Determinant of Evaluation of Product Personalities-A Cross Cultural Study

A cross-cultural study was carried out in Germany and in South Korea in order to investigate the relationship between brand personality and product personality facilitating the three dimensions of personality; agreeableness, excitement, and extroversion. Two pairs of shoes were prepared across categories of product function; symbolic (a pair of high-heeled shoes) versus utilitarian (a pair of sport shoes). In experiments, each pair of shoes was labeled as a luxury brand (“Versace”) or a casual brand (“CA “Migliore”, South Korea) or left unlabeled. Prior to the experiments, an expert group in each country evaluated the brand personality in terms of “cheerful” (agreeableness), “honest” (conscientiousness), and “provocative” (extroversion) and the results were considered as a baseline. In Experiment I and II, subjects were exposed to two pairs of shoes labeled in one of the three ways and assessed the personality of both pairs of shoes using the personality traits, cheerful, honest, and provocative. Identical versions of the experiment 2 were conveyed in Germany (N=56), an individualist culture, and in South Korea (N=72), a collectivist culture, and we purposed to find cultural differences in evaluating product personalities influenced by brands. The empirical results do not show any significant influence of brand personality on product personality in either cultural group (p>.05). Nevertheless, the subjects estimated the retail price of the shoes to be significantly different depending on the brands in both cultural groups (p<.001). 1. PERSONALITY THEORIES ON BRAND AND PRODUCT Consumer behavior research has given considerable attention to the construction of brand personality, which refers to the set of human characteristics associated with a brand. Aaker (1997) developed a structure of brand personality dimensions in which the distinctive dimensions are: sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, and ruggedness. Aaker noted that with the use of the brand personality scale, the marketing variables, such as user imagination, advertising, and packaging, could be manipulated systemically. Relating these dimensions with the “Big Five”(John, 1990), the five dimensions of human personality, sincerity would related to agreeableness, excitement with extroversion, and competence with conscientiousness, while sophistication and ruggedness are unique dimensions related to brand personality (Aaker, 1997). Hence, Aaker’s work provided a theoretical framework of the brand personality construct by determining the number and the nature of dimensions of brand personality. On the other hand, in Govers (2004), the personality of a product was developed only in terms of agreeableness, extroversion, and conscientiousness. Instead, Govers’s work proposed paired sets of traits describing each dimension in a dichotomized way. The three dimensions of product personality can provide companies a systematic way of developing characteristic profiles of a product required by the market. Despite an increasing number of studies addressing the impact of the personality of either a brand or a product, little attention has been focused on the relationship between a brand and a product in terms of personality dimensions. Rather, some research has explained the relationship between brands and products in a comprehensive way. For example, brands add value to products by supplying meaning (McCracken, 1993), communicating competence, standard, and image to the consumer (Lim and O’Cass, 2001). Some research asserts that brand personalities