Creating Customer-based Brand Personality

In the modern society where commodities flourish and brands abound, more and more homogeneous products come forth. The consuming activities are becoming more emotional than reasonable. Against the background, brand personality is an important measure for solving the differenization problems, which is a tough task in marketing. This is a long-term tendency. First, brand personality bestows the brand with vitality and affinity, enabling the brand for emotional communication with the target group, through which the loyalty of the target group can be enhanced. Secondly, as the soft spiritual aspect, the brand personality can hardly be imitated once it comes into being, which makes it a powerful weapon for brand differenization. Based on current literature and theories on marketing and consumer psychology, this thesis employs illustrative and contrastive study methods to analyze the framework of consumer-based brand personality and elaborates on the process of its creation.The innovations of this thesis lie in: 1. It studies brand personality creation form the perspective of consumers, which distinguishes itself from corporation-based brand personality creation. It analyzes the consumer's understanding of brand personality to help establish good brand relationship and unique brand association. 2. It pays much attention to the experience marketing plays in brand personality establishment, breaking away from the conventional way of advertisement piling. 3. It lays emphasis on the application of CMR (Customer Management of Relationship)in the customer-brand relationship, instead of the traditional CRM(Customer Relationship Management).The thesis consists of five parts: the preface, chapter 1, chapter 2, chapter 3 and the conclusion.The introduction summarizes the current literature concerning brand personality. Referring to failure cases of corporation-based brand personality and with consideration of objective demands, it proposes the focus of the thesis: consumer-based brand personality creation, and explains the theoretical and practical significance of the study. First, it considers brand personality creation from perspective of consumers to make the brand seem to be created specially for them. By doing so, it helps to better meet consumers' psychological demand and to establish a closer consumer-brand relationship. Secondly, consumer-based brand personality creation contributes to building and accumulation of brand property because brand personality has a great power for brand property increment. Thirdly, consumer-based brand personality creation can meet consumers' needs and adapt itself to consumer changes, so that we can better satisfy customers and get away from brand imitation and price war to set up a lasting competition advantage.Chapter one gives definitions of relevant concepts and literature review. It offers a detailed introduction about personality, brand personality, framework of brand personality and the types of brand personality, etc. It summarized researches on brand personality into three respects. The first is the conceptual study of brand personality, including understanding of the concept, sources of brand personality and the difference between brand personality, brand image, and consumer image. The second is the study on description and measurement of brand personality. The thesis describes methods of qualitative and quantitative study. The third is the study concerning application of brand personality, including expression of brand personality with story, brand relationship establishment by brand personality and how to build brand personality, etc. This chapter defines some basic concepts and summarizes the literature, preparing for the discussion on inherent mechanism of consumer-based brand personality in the next chapter.Chapter two describes the inherent mechanism of customer-based brand personality in the theoretical aspect. Firstly, it defines consumer-based brand personality as consumers' various reactions to marketing activities of a brand, which are generat...