In 2006 Apple launched the first of three new television advertisements for Mac
laptops. A young man dressed in casual clothes introduces himself as a Mac (‘Hi, I
am a Mac’). An older, more conservative-looking man enters the scene, intro-
ducing himself as PC. The two, clearly very different personalities, act out a brief
vignette in which the capabilities and attributes of ‘Mac’ and ‘PC’ are compared.
The PC is represented as a formal and stuffy person overly concerned with work –
often being frustrated by the superior abilities of the more laid-back Mac. The two,
the casual Mac and the more uptight PC, discuss some of the everyday difficulties
of the PC and how the Mac does not have these problems. The Mac personality
versus the PC personality is an example of a brand that takes the theoretical possi-
bilities of the personality approach literally, using the brand personality to position
and differentiate the brand against other brands in the same product category.
Consumers automatically ascribe personality to brands. This process is a central
aspect of consumers’ symbolic consumption and construction of self. The person-
ality approach in brand management hence focuses on how and why people
choose brands with certain personalities and how imbuing brands with personality
thus can be a powerful tool to create and enhance brand equity. The assumptions,
theories and methods of the personality approach borrow from the academic fields
of human psychology, personality research and consumer behaviour.
Understanding consumers’ attraction to brand personalities has for long been an
area of interest in consumer behaviour research, where research has focused on
how brand personality enables consumers to express ‘self’ through the symbolic
use of brand personality. In a brand management context, practitioners have
viewed brand personality primarily as a way to differentiate the brand from other
brands in the same product category; as a driver of consumer preference; and as a
common denominator that can be used across different national cultures. Several
interesting and groundbreaking research articles have been published, but one
article in particular can be said to have stirred the pot and set new agendas:
‘Dimensions of brand personality’ (Jennifer Aaker 1997) presented a whole new
theoretical framework and method for working with brand personality that has
since been validated and expanded by several studies. This chapter offers an
overview of the personality approach by providing insights into the assumptions,
key theoretical elements and methodologies underlying the personality approach.
Finally, this chapter describes and discusses the managerial guidelines that can be
accumulated from the literature, supplemented with cases describing how
companies can manage brand personality in practice.
Assumptions of the personality approach
Previous approaches in brand management have placed the Four Ps, the identity
of the corporation, or the consumer at the heart of brand equity creation (respec-
tively the economic approach in chapter 4, the identity approach in chapter 5, and
the consumer-based approach in chapter 6). In the personality approach, it is
assumed that consumers’ need for identity and expression of self is a key driver of
the consumption of a brand. This is why consumers, apart from the physical and
The personality approach 117