What should a marketer know about brand personality theory and practice
1. What is brand personality?
1.1 The background of brand personality.
The first time when brand personality was mentioned was in 1955 by David Ogilvy (Ogilvy, 1955) when he had a lecture to American Associate of advertising Agencies. This concept comes out in the specifically background. As the developing of the technology, the produce with the same quality become much than before. Producers need a new method to identify themselves from each other. On the other hand, customers want to identify themselves from each other too. They need a method to express their personality. So brand personality is on the table with the responsibility of identify produces and satisfy the emotional and personal require of customers.
1.2 The history of the developing of brand personality
As the first mention (Ogilvy, 1955) from now is fifty years already. In these fifty years people never stop to reach brand personality and their reaches a mainly on three aspect. The first one is on the conception level. They defined brand personality with description (Allen. Olson, 1958), dimensionality (Aaker, 1997), and relationship (Susan Fourneir, 1998). The second one is on reach level. And it can be separate to qualitative reach(Levy, 1985; Plummer, 1985) and quantitative reach (Davil Aaker,1997; Bill Merrrilees, 1999; Dale Miller, 2001; Shengbing Huang. Taihong Lu, 2003). The last one is on how to manage brand personality. Someone think it’s the tool that brand express themselves to customer (King, 1989), someone think it just the information created by AD (Lannon. Cooper, 1983), and someone think it’s one of the determinants of build a brand (Keller, 1989; Aaker, 1991; Biel, 1993).(Yanhui Zhao, 2004)
1.3 what is the role of brand personality in build a brand
According to Kevin Lane Keller, brand personality is just one attribute of brand imagine (appendix 1). The