Separating Brand from Category Personality

Consumers often describe brands by using adjectival descriptors of personality traits, and marketers often create or reinforce these perceptions by their brand positioning. Successfully positioning a brand's personality within a product category requires measurement models that are able to disentangle a brand's unique personality traits from those traits that are common to all brands in the product category. This paper proposes a factor model that separates the two by using category-level and brand-level random effects. It illustrates the model on a data-set about brand personalities in three categories (Jeans, Magazines and Cars), and investigates the marketing implications of the results obtained with the model, through analysis of the parameter estimates. The analyses provide support for our conjecture that entire product categories (or sub-categories), not simply brands within them, are perceived to possess personality characteristics, which can be leveraged for marketing strategy.