How Luxury Brands can benefit from Personality-based Branding

Luxury brand management is identity–driven. Drawing on the concept of anthropomorphisation, Klaus Heine and Haibo Xue outline how to complement identity-driven with personality-driven branding; to create brand meaning in times of symbolic consumption, and how to start bringing your brand personality alive by answering five questions about the Big Five of Luxury Brand Personality.

Across virtually all societies, humans feel a need to anthropomorphise inanimate objects (Freling and Forbes, 2005). When asked to imagine a brand as a person, people show no difficulty in assigning human characteristics to brands as if they would describe other people. Brand managers often try to humanise their brands with anthropomorphisation techniques using brand characters, mascots, and spokespeople. Benefits include improved brand liking and closer brand-consumer relationships, which can even reach the level of brand love and ‘irrational’ loyalty (MacInnis and Folkes, 2017).

Paradoxically, anecdotal evidence suggests that many brand managers do not believe their brand to be people themselves, even though they may aim at creating anthropomorphised brands in the minds of consumers. For many brands, ‘brand personality’ still does not consist of more than a few traits that are used for brand personification (Freling and Forbes, 2005). Drawing on the concept of anthropomorphisation, the personality-driven approach to branding complements identity-driven brand