ABSTRACT

Between Brand Personality, Spokesperson's Image and

Consumer Self-Image

As the value of the brand equity becomes more important, many companies try to build strong brands by effective marketing strategies. However they have not found any definite way to get it. Therefore, this study suggest brand personality as a solution for this problem.

The motivation of purchasing a certain brand is for the psychological symbols that consumers want to pursuit or express by using or possessing it. So, if companies build brand personality that is consistent with consumer's image(actual & ideal), they will stay predominant over any other competitors. Brand personality also could be affected by spokesperson's image, so this study was conducted to examine which consistency between brand personality, consumer's actual and ideal image and spokesperson's image would influence on a brand evaluation.

This research was conducted with two product categories, credit card and cosmetics.

The result is that there are five dimension of brand personality for each product. For a credit card, they are 'reliance','sophistication', 'activeness', 'competence', 'warm-heartedness' and for a cosmetic, they are 'sophistication', 'activeness', 'purity', 'elegance', 'rationality'.

In the case of a credit card, it was proved that the consistency between actual/ideal self-image and brand personality had significant effects on brand evaluation, especially in the dimension of 'reliance' and 'activeness'. For a cosmetics, the consistency between actual/ideal self-image and spokesperson's image had significant effects on brand attitude, especially in the dimension of 'purity' and 'activeness'.

These findings would be used for segmentation on the base of the specific brand personality dimensions or selection of spokesperson who is suited to the dimension of brand personality.

...........................................................................
Key words : brand personality, consumer self-image, spokesperson's image