Surveying the Relationship between Brand Equity and Brand-Customer Personality Congruency

Assigning human`s personality features to brands is one of the main subjects that has beenfocused by researchers in latest decades. On the other hand, congruency of brand personalitywith customers` personality is a concept that could affect brand equity. So in order to explorethis relationship, this research has tested a model in Shahrvand Chain Stores of Tehran.Sample of 185 customers of this store has been selected and finally with return rate of 90%,163 usable questionnaires have been returned. Partial Least Square method using SMARTPLS software V 1.5 showed that brand-customer personality congruency has significant andpositive relationship with brand trust (t=2.214, =β0.205) and brand identification (t= 1.944, =β0.179 with sig< 0.10), also brand identification has positive relationship on brand loyalty(t=5.371, =β0.467) and brand trust has positive effect on brand loyalty (t=3.741, =β0.346)and brand equity (t=2.583, =β0.267), and finally brand loyalty has positive effect on brandequity (t=5.039, =β0.559). In the other hand, the results revealed that brand-customerpersonality congruency has no direct effect on brand loyalty. Also brand identification do notdirectly affects brand equity