Abstract:

Brand personality, initially explored by J. Plummer (1985) and later studied by J. Aaker (1997), is an idea that brands have 'personalities' or a set of human characteristics associated or linked with a brand in many people's minds. It reflects how people feel about a brand, rather than what they think the brand can do or perform. It is an essential element for brands to stand out from the competition, to win the hearts and minds of increasingly fickle and jaded consumers, and to last as part of brand equity even though the product life cycle continues to shorten. Research on brand personality is increasingly useful for brand development. Projective depth research has proven the most insightful of the approaches used. The approaches typically have used, however, in-depth, face to face (individual or small groups) interviews which are time-consuming and expensive. The focus of this paper is to migrate this in-depth, in-person research construct for brand personality to online, and secondly to compare the results from the online and offline environment.