Brand Personality Factor Based Models: A Critical Review

Abstract

Brand personality has become an increasingly important concept within brand theory and factor based research is the method most widely used in the study of brand personality. There have been critiques of some aspects of early factor models, leading to an evolution and improvement in the methods used in factor model development. However, several problems remain which have yet to be addressed, and these raise questions about what exactly the factor models are measuring. This paper introduces and explains the problems of category confusions, domain meaning shifts, and the descriptor selection problem. In doing so, the paper extends existing critiques of the methods in brand personality factor research, and raises questions about the validity of current factor based models. The paper concludes with a recommendation that brand personality researchers re-evaluate their models and the brand personality concept, and that brand personality returns to its roots in qualitative projective methods.