Measuring and managing the essence of a brand personality

Abstract

Brand managers constantly face the dilemma of adapting their brands to changing consumer taste without diluting the brand’s essence. This study presents an approach that can be used to establish which features constitute the essence of a brand, and how candidate new features would affect the perceived essence of the brand. We build on Ahn’s (1998) causal status hypothesis, which holds that the essence of concepts (e.g., brands) consists of those features perceived to cause most other features of the brand. We empirically illustrate how this approach provides important information about consumer perceptions of envisaged changes to an existing brand. Copyright Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2006Branding, Positioning,

Capturing the essence of a corporate brand personality: A Western brand in Eastern Europe

“…We found a significant correlation between the perceived necessity of the feature of a brand and its causality, which is in line with earlier fi ndings. 40 A positive fi nding for marketers in the fi eld of corporate brands is that our respondents saw quite a strong link between the communication emphasis of McDonald ' s and their own perception of the essence and the liking of specifi c features. It seems that marketing communication is still a strong voice in the noisy choir of corporate brand-related signals.…”

“…Similar to the view of brand essence as the hub that connects the spokes of brand associations, the characteristic (or characteristics) that consumers perceive to cause the largest number of other characteristics can be regarded as brand essence from a consumer perspective. 24,25 Operationalised in this manner, brand essence becomes a property that resides within the customers CAPTURING THE ESSENCE OF A CORPORATE BRAND PERSONALITY of a brand, and can be measured and tracked.…”

“…Van Rekom et al . 28 applied Ahn ' s 29 proposition in a marketing setting, and found that the more consumers believed a characteristic to cause the other characteristics of the brand, the more they perceived that characteristic to form the essence of that brand. In this way, brand essence can be measured by establishing the causal relationships between all features.…”

“…The responses were coded according to the scheme developed by Van Rekom et al . 32 : ' yes, I agree ' was coded as 1, while ' No, on the contrary ' was coded as ' − 1 ' , because in this case one characteristic would impede the realisation of the other characteristic. The two other options ( ' these two are unrelated to each other ' , and ' I agree, but this does not apply to Mc Donald ' s ' ) were coded ' 0 ' .…”

“…In addition to this construct, we took a direct measure of the perceived necessity of each feature for Mc Donald ' s. ' Perceived necessity ' is related to the degree to which a characteristic causes the other characteristics of a brand. 33 When one brand characteristic causes many other characteristics, the elimination of this feature implies that the consumer ' s whole image of the brand is likely to change. Since such a feature is highly essential, consumers will have the impression that the brand is no longer the same brand.…”