Abstract
The focus of brand differentiation is shifting increasingly to symbolic benefits mainly because of changing market conditions and consumer preferences. On the one hand, the functional benefits of many products on the market today become increasingly equivalent and exchangeable. On the other hand, an increasing number of consumers engage in symbolic consumption and decide for a product mainly due to the congruity between their personality and the symbolic personality of the product or brand. These trends lead to an increased interest in the brand personality concept, which offers a systematic approach to create symbolic benefits. Although luxury brands are characterised with strong symbolic benefits that often even exceed their functional benefits and that refer to a large extent to human personality traits, there exists only a small literature base about the symbolic meaning of luxury brands and no specific brand personality framework. This paper sets a foundation for a luxury brand personality framework with an investigation of personality traits as the basic elements of a brand personality. More specifically, its objective is to uncover the entire universe of personality traits that luxury brands represent in the eyes of their consumers based on two empirical studies. These studies focus on luxury fashion brands as this industry covers the biggest variety of brand images. As a prerequisite, this paper defines luxury brands as the objects of investigation, explains the concept of brand personality and its common research methodology and outlines the requirements and selection criteria for luxury brand personality traits. The brand personality refers to the set of human characteristics associated with a brand. Aaker developed the most established theoretical framework of brand personality dimensions and a scale to measure them by drawing on research about the Big Five human personality dimensions. More than 600 U.S. respondents rated on a five-point Likert scale a subset of 37 general brands of varying categories on 114 personality traits. Aaker consolidated the personality traits by factor analyses to five distinct dimensions. This paper proposes a research methodology specifically for the investigation of luxury brand personality traits. It builds on a consumer-oriented qualitative approach using the repertory grid method (RGM), which is constrained by a conceptual framework of guidelines and selection criteria, but remains flexible enough to consider the ambiguous and contextual aspects of brand personality. While the quantitative approach requires deleting ambiguous and contextual traits that load on multiple factors, RGM allows respondents to describe constructs with a group of words and enables researchers to decode their varying contextual meanings for different constructs. In addition, RGM matches the consumer-orientation in brand management as the resulting sets of traits and brands originate directly from the respondents. A major modification to the common research approach is that each trait has to consist of three adjectives. While a single adjective can be very ambiguous, word combinations become more precise as people can rely on their overlapping meaning. The first study covers in-depth interviews with about 50 luxury consumers about their associations with luxury brands according to the RGM and led to a set of 49 personality traits and five major personality dimensions. These dimensions include modernity, eccentricity, opulence, elitism, and strength. Modernity describes the temporal perspective of a brand, which can lie either in the past or in the present or future. Eccentricity describes the level of discrepancy from social norms and expectations. Opulence refers to the level of conspicuousness of the symbols of wealth. These symbols cover a wide range of associations including ostentatious logos and valuable materials. Elitism covers the level of status and exclusivity that is displayed by the brand. Finally, strength describes the level of toughness and masculinity of a brand. The validity of results improves if they are replicated with other studies and with varying research methodologies. To this end, the resulting set of personality traits was tested and adapted with a complementary study that includes face-to-face interviews with about 60 luxury insiders, who were asked to describe their associations with several luxury brand print adverts first in their own words and then with the help of the pre-existing personality traits. Results include the first comprehensive overview of luxury brand personality traits categorized by the five major personality dimensions. Altogether, there are 52 luxury brand personality traits including for example “traditional, history-charged, time-honored” and “modern, future- conscious, progressive”. For researchers, these findings offer a foundation for further research on luxury brand personality and analyzing its antecedents and consequences. Because of the focus on Germany, the complexity of the subject and changes in the luxury symbolism over time, the resulting set of traits cannot be seen as a generally applicable, static and final solution. For example, the trait catalogue could be verified and adapted by additional empirical studies for specific luxury industries, consumer segments or for other countries. In addition, the set of traits provides a basis for the verification of the personality dimensions with a quantitative consumer survey according to the approach of Aaker and for analyses about specific trait combinations, binary oppositions or comprehensive personality profiles. The categorization of luxury brand personality traits provides marketers a framework for the analysis of emotional luxury brand images and the development of a luxury brand personality, so to say its “aura”, “magic” or “DNA”.