Brand personality: How to make the metaphor fit?

The Big Five Model of human personality [Goldberg, 1990, J. Pers, Sec. Psychol. 59, 1216] reduces the large number of adjectives describing human personalities to only five latent dimensions (the so-called Big Five Factors of Extroversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, and Openness), which provide a consensual framework for classifying and organizing descriptors of human personality. This paper examines 12 mass-market brands to determine to what extent, in a consumer setting, the Big Five can serve as a metaphor to describe enduring characteristics of brands. More than 1500 subjects evaluated their own personalities and those of three brands by using 40 adjectives (8 for each trait) typical of the dimensions of human personality according to the Big Five Factor Model. Results from exploratory factor analyses showed that the five-factor structure is not replicated when describing brands. Rather, at a higher level of abstraction in the hierarchical organization of personality characteristics, results supported a two-trait solution, It was also found that descriptors of human personality convey different meanings when attributed to different brands. While the psycholexical approach remains a suitable procedure to identify brand descriptors, the factors used to describe human personalities appear to be inappropriate for describing the brands studied here. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.