The Personality of Luxury Fashion Brands

Abstract

The focus of brand differentiation is shifting increasingly tosymbolic benefits mainly because of changing marketconditions and consumer preferences. On the one hand, thefunctional benefits of many products on the market todaybecome increasingly equivalent and exchangeable. On the otherhand, an increasing number of consumers engage in symbolicconsumption and decide for a product mainly due to thecongruity between their personality and the symbolicpersonality of the product or brand. These trends lead to anincreased interest in the brand personality concept, whichoffers a systematic approach to create symbolic benefits. Although luxury brands are characterised with strongsymbolic benefits that often even exceed their functionalbenefits and that refer to a large extent to human personalitytraits, there exists only a small literature base about thesymbolic meaning of luxury brands and no specific brandpersonality framework. This paper sets a foundation for aluxury brand personality framework with an investigation ofpersonality traits as the basic elements of a brand personality. More specifically, its objective is to uncover the entireuniverse of personality traits that luxury brands represent inthe eyes of their consumers based on two empirical studies. These studies focus on luxury fashion brands as this industrycovers 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 commonresearch methodology and outlines the requirements andselection criteria for luxury brand personality traits. The brand personality refers to the set of humancharacteristics associated with a brand. Aaker developed themost established theoretical framework of brand personalitydimensions and a scale to measure them by drawing onresearch about the Big Five human personality dimensions. More than 600 U.S. respondents rated on a five-point Likertscale a subset of 37 general brands of varying categories on114 personality traits. Aaker consolidated the personality traitsby factor analyses to five distinct dimensions. This paperproposes a research methodology specifically for theinvestigation of luxury brand personality traits. It builds on aconsumer-oriented qualitative approach using the repertory gridmethod (RGM), which is constrained by a conceptual framework of guidelines and selection criteria, but remainsflexible enough to consider the ambiguous and contextualaspects of brand personality. While the quantitative approachrequires deleting ambiguous and contextual traits that load onmultiple factors, RGM allows respondents to describeconstructs with a group of words and enables researchers todecode their varying contextual meanings for differentconstructs. In addition, RGM matches the consumer-orientationin brand management as the resulting sets of traits and brandsoriginate directly from the respondents. A major modificationto the common research approach is that each trait has toconsist of three adjectives. While a single adjective can bevery ambiguous, word combinations become more precise aspeople can rely on their overlapping meaning. The first study covers in-depth interviews with about 50luxury consumers about their associations with luxury brandsaccording to the RGM and led to a set of 49 personality traitsand five major personality dimensions. These dimensionsinclude modernity, eccentricity, opulence, elitism, and strength. Modernity describes the temporal perspective of a brand, whichcan lie either in the past or in the present or future. Eccentricity describes the level of discrepancy from socialnorms and expectations. Opulence refers to the level ofconspicuousness of the symbols of wealth. These symbolscover a wide range of associations including ostentatious logosand valuable materials. Elitism covers the level of status andexclusivity that is displayed by the brand. Finally, strengthdescribes the level of toughness and masculinity of a brand. The validity of results improves if they are replicated withother studies and with varying research methodologies. To thisend, the resulting set of personality traits was tested andadapted with a complementary study that includes face-to-faceinterviews with about 60 luxury insiders, who were asked todescribe their associations with several luxury brand printadverts first in their own words and then with the help of thepre-existing personality traits. Results include the first comprehensive overview of luxurybrand personality traits categorized by the five majorpersonality dimensions. Altogether, there are 52 luxury brandpersonality traits including for example “traditional,history-charged, time-honored” and “modern, future- conscious,progressive”. For researchers, these findings offer a foundationfor further research on luxury brand personality and analyzingits antecedents and consequences. Because of the focus onGermany, the complexity of the subject and changes in theluxury symbolism over time, the resulting set of traits cannotbe seen as a generally applicable, static and final solution. Forexample, 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 setof traits provides a basis for the verification of the personalitydimensions with a quantitative consumer survey according tothe approach of Aaker and for analyses about specific traitcombinations, binary oppositions or comprehensive personalityprofiles. The categorization of luxury brand personality traitsprovides marketers a framework for the analysis of emotionalluxury brand images and the development of a luxury brandpersonality, so to say its “aura”, “magic” or “DNA”.