Consumers’ brand personality perceptions in a digital world: A systematic literature review and research agenda

Abstract

In a digital world, it is becoming increasingly important for marketing researchers and practitioners to understand how consumers attribute humanlike characteristics and personality traits to brands, as the brand's personality has a significant influence on consumers’ behavior and their brand relationships. However, despite a growth in research interest over the past two decades, the literature on consumers’ digital brand personality perceptions remains fragmented and dispersed across digital contexts. Thus, now is an opportune time to take stock of the field and build a knowledge foundation for future research to establish the domain of digital brand personality. To this end, this systematic literature review, based on the TCCM framework, identifies dominant theories, contexts, characteristics, and methodologies used to study consumers’ digital brand personality perceptions by systematically reviewing 107 peer‐reviewed journal articles published between 2005 and 2021. Using an in‐depth content analysis of the articles, this review integrates research findings from different digital contexts and provides a new conceptual framework of digital brand personality. The review concludes with a comprehensive research agenda that highlights the need to broaden the theoretical groundings of the field (theory); identifies numerous digital touchpoints and new technologies that remain underexplored (context); reveals inconsistencies and knowledge gaps regarding dimensions, antecedents, and consequences of digital brand personality (characteristics); and suggests diverse, digital‐based research approaches (methodology) to further advance the study of consumers’ digital brand personality perceptions.

Ad avoidance in the digital context: A systematic literature review and research agenda

“…Wang, Cheah, & Lim, 2022). ( 2) It helps in the theoretical and empirical investigation of a research topic (Ghorbani et al, 2022;Hassan et al, 2022). ( 3) It is often used to identify the key variables and relationships of a field of interest by performing an analysis of its characteristics.…”

The influence of Instagrammers’ recommendations on healthy food purchase intention: The role of consumer involvement

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“…However, surprisingly little is understood about how these relationships emerge on digital platforms. In their article titled “ Consumers' brand personality perceptions in a digital world: A systematic literature review and research agenda ” by Ghorbani et al (2022) used the TCCM framework (Tsiotsou & Boukis, 2022) to identify dominant theories, contexts, characteristics, and methodologies that have been used to study the digital brand personality perceptions of consumers. Based on their systematic review and in‐depth content analysis of 107 peer‐reviewed journal articles published between 2005 and 2021, the authors provide a new conceptual framework for digital brand personality and a comprehensive research agenda covering all aspects of the framework.…”