Brands have personalities ?!

According to O’Connell (2015) consumers view brands as living entities, where brands are been perceived by customers as either a masculine or a feminine brand. The author mentioned a study that was done on 130,000 German consumers found that branded products that are seen adventurous, aggressive, brave, where categorized by customers as masculine brands, where on the other hand, brands that reflected traits as fragile, graceful, sensitive were categorized as feminine brands. Companies intensively work to understand the minds of customers.
          Indeed the brand personality concept is very true, for instance few days back I was out with my mother and her hand bag captured my attention, I started checking out her hand bag and I really did not like the design of the bag, mom felt the dislike on my face and said: it is a Gucci bag. The moment I heard the name Gucci (a brand that I consider as sophisticated and lavish) my whole perception and look to the bag changed and I started loving the hand bag. This incident clearly reflects how customers associate traits to the various brand names in the market, where these attributes are usually stored in the minds of customers and triggered once they get exposed to a stimulus. Stimuli are those elements that evoke a set of feelings when customers get exposed to firms billboard adverts, TV commercial and brand logo (Solomon, 2012). Moreover in consumer behavior studies, it is claimed that customers learn and shape attitudes by responding to a stimulus which is created by companies. Many customers select to buy from brands that match and express their personalities, this proves that customers nowadays are victims of the various branding schemes done by large marketing corporations where the majority of the brand characters are been actually created by these entities (Aaker, 1997). Consumers should be very conscious towards the marketing efforts of firms to trigger their emotions at the time of making purchase decisions, alternatively customers should follow their intellectual power in making buying decisions.

References

Aaker, J. L. (1997). Dimensions of brand personality. Journal of marketing Research, 34(3), 347-356. Retrieved April 23, 2015, from http://ezproxy.squ.edu.om:2145/docview/235235096?accountid=27575

O’Connell, A. (2015) Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from                  https://hbr.org/2015/04/why-do-we-get-so-emotional-about-brands

Solomon, M. R. (2012). Consumer behavior: Buying, Having and being. United States of America: Pearson education.