A new approach to measure perceived brand personality associations among consumers.

Heere, Bob

Introduction

The global sport entertainment market is more competitive than ever, and on an everyday basis, people can choose from many different sport leagues around the world (Raney & Bryant, 2006). Cable television has opened up many new lines of media for sport leagues and people in the United States can now easily follow the English Premier League, or the UEFA Champions League. Europeans in their turn have not only access to the different soccer leagues or Formula 1 Racing, but can just as easily follow the American leagues such as the National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball, or NASCAR racing, or the Australian Football League and the Super 14. In addition, people in New Zealand and Australia have access to their own sport as well as the aforementioned European and North American Leagues. In this cluttered environment it is important for sport leagues to understand how their league is perceived, and the associations people have with their league, so they can provide their organization with a distinctive brand image.

Branding research has made noticeable progress in outlining the relationship between consumers and organizations with research in brand equity, brand experience, brand community, and brand personality (Aaker, 1991; Aaker, 1997; Brakus, Schmitt, & Zarantello, 2009; Grohmann, 2009; Keller, 1993; Muniz & O'Guinn, 2001). Sport leagues can use these fields of research to gain more insight in the ways in which their own consumer base perceives their brand. Especially for smaller sport leagues that gain their revenues from a small part of the population, outlining the right associations these people have with their product can be critical to their survival. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the set of brand personality associations managers use within their brand strategy, and how these associations are perceived by the consumers of the different teams within the New Zealand Netball League. By examining the brand personality associations of the teams in this league, the author expects to gain insight on how well the managers of the different teams are capable of branding their organizations through personality associations, and how these associations are perceived by their consumer base.

Measuring Brand Personality

Marketing scholars have been struggling with measuring the concept of brand personality. Brand personality is referred to as the set of human characteristics associated with a brand (Aaker, 1997). Aaker introduced the concept of brand personality and used factor analysis to develop a five dimensional scale to measure brand personality. Her model was built upon the work in psychology by Goldberg (1992), who developed a five factor scale to measure personality. However, Aaker's model has severe limitations and despite the proposition of Aaker that the scale is valid, its validity has yet to be demonstrated (Azoulay & Kapferer, 2003). Despite the large sample of brands that were used to develop this scale, the spectrum of adjectives that were found to be a part of the brand personality are limited and arguably only cover a small part of the universe of adjectives. In contrast to the scale of Goldberg (1992), Aaker did not implement a synonym-antonym approach. For example, Aaker argued that both contemporary and outdoorsy are part of the list, but likely antonyms to these terms such as classic and urban are not present in the model. Moreover, as Azoulay and Kapferer (2003) noted, this model failed to divide concepts of individual psychology and social psychology, and assigned certain groups characteristics as a part of an individual's personality such as gender and social class.

In addition to the criticism of Azoulay and Kapferer (2003), the author would like to propose the scale as developed by Aaker (1997) lacks validity at a conceptual level, based on the notion that a brand cannot possess personality traits. Claiming a brand has a personality, is an anthropomorphism. A brand can only be given traits by people, and mainly originates as a result of the marketing approach of the managers within the company. The anthropomorphic associations consumers have of the brand are caused by marketing strategies of the organization. Nike could be regarded as an innovative, inspirational, and creative company because the organization has spent billions of dollars over time in creating that image through their marketing strategies (Wieden, 1992). The argument that the consumers' perception of the brand personality is manipulated by the marketers is supported within the study of Johar, Sengupta, and Aaker (2005). They examined the effects of an experiment (marketing strategies) on the consumers' perception of the brand personality and acknowledge that those perceptions only alter after exposure to new brand information. To a similar extent, Swaminathan, Stilley, and Ahluwalia (2009) performed experiments in which manipulations were performed to alter and/or create a brand personality for (fictitious and non-fictitious) brands. Findings of brand personality research so far are therefore not only a simple reflection of what image the management successfully or unsuccessfully marketed to the outside world, they are often simply a confirmation of what brand image a company attempts to compose. Brand personality associations are the result of an endless line of experiments performed by marketers to manipulate the consumers' perception of the brand, and any measurement of this perception should start with acknowledging the manipulating ability of marketers.

Based on the notion that managers have a strong influence on the brand personality, are largely responsible for creating one, and therefore should easily be able to sum up the personality characteristics that lead them in their marketing strategy, it is proposed that providing a set model for all brands is not only an unnecessary exercise, it is also inherently flawed. The use of factor analysis to develop a model to measure such a brand personality model should therefore be regarded critically. The main purpose of factor analysis is to find patterns in relationships between observed variables in order to measure these variables with a smaller amount of (unobserved) variables, called factors (Hair, Black, Babin, Anderson, & Tatham, 2005). However, while factor analysis assumes these latent factors are present, Aaker (1997) never provides conceptual support for her five latent variables (sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, and ruggedness.) and the five resulting factors found by her might be more of the result of schematic associations that consumers have with the brands in their respective contexts, rather than these variables represent a latent trait. It is likely that in certain cultures and contexts a grouping exists that in other contexts is not there. Smith, Graetz, and Westerbeek (2006) performed a brand personality study for an Australian netball team and their results provided a different model than Aaker proposes. If the work of Aaker (1997) is compared with the study of Smith et al. (2006), there are two dimensions that particularly stand out and indicate that the factors Aaker found might be more schematic based, than true factors. Excitement, as proposed by Aaker, represents associations such as up-to-date, spirited, exciting, cool, and young. A claim that for a sport team is counter-intuitive, since excitement in sport is often referred to by fans as a close contest, offensive play or athletic ability (Wann, 1995), and might only have low correlations with associations such as cool and young. The other factor that might be particularly troublesome is sophistication. Sophistication represents associations such as feminine, smooth, good-looking, upper class, and charming. Even though a female netball team is unquestionably feminine (as Smith and colleagues found), and thus has a high correlation to the brand, the other associations were not strongly related to a netball team brand. Research outside the realm of sport management indeed indicates that using Aaker's scale in different contexts results in different factors (Brakus, Schmitt, & Zarantello, 2009; Rojas-Mendez, Erenchun-Podlech, & Silva-Olave, 2004; Venable, Rose, Bush, & Gilbert, 2005).

Based on these limitations, it is argued in this study that for academics to examine the personality of a brand, a different technique should be implemented that acknowledges the ability of managers to create and manipulate the perceived personality associations of the brand. Friedmann (1986) offered an alternative method to examine associations connected to an object. People have developed different strategies to create meaning of the world around them. According to Friedmann, the Psychological Meaning (PM) strategy is the one that best describes the relationship between consumer and the product. Following Szalay and Deese (1978), he stated: "[PM] ... is said to characterize those things that are most salient in the way an individual reacts to a given perceptual stimulus, as well as describing the direction and affection of these "things" or components" (p. 4). PM can be measured by asking respondents to provide a list of one-word associations with the object at hand (Friedmann & Jugenheimer, 1985). As Friedmann (1986) stated: "As such, the PM procedure represents a closer approximation to the "real" components of meaning that a consumer derives when perceiving a product than do more traditional and commonly used measurement tools" (p. 10). Using this research method would allow us to grasp a better understanding of the meaning of the brand, by asking the managers of the organization to use this free listing technique to describe their own brand.

This list of personality associations lies arguably at the foundation of the marketers' attempts to create and manipulate a brand personality for their consumers, and could then be used to assess the effectiveness of the marketers to shape this image within the minds of their consumers. By asking the consumers to evaluate how important these associations are to them, and how well the organization represents them, the author can gain a strong and valid insight into the perceived personality associations of the brand.

Purpose of Study

In contrast to the factor modeling technique Aaker (1997) introduced, the purpose of this study is to use a research strategy that finds the associations managers use to create the personality of the brand, and then to evaluate these associations among the consumers of the brand. Using the free-listing PM approach of Friedmann (1986) acknowledges that managers are largely responsible for the creation of the brand personality. Because this gives a clear picture on what personality associations are related to the brand (thereby arguably accomplishing what the factor modeling technique claims to do), the author can bypass this step within the survey, and an assessment can be made whether the managers are effective in marketing their desired image to their consumer. Rather than measuring the personality of the brand, the author attempts to measure what personality associations managers implement in their marketing strategy, and how consumers perceive these associations. Using this strategy takes into account that a brand does not possess an intrinsic personality, but is only given such traits by different interest groups (manager, consumers), and allows for examination of discrepancy between the two groups. To examine the efforts of the managers' manipulation, consumers were asked to evaluate the associations in order of importance and representativeness.

Method

Research Setting

New Zealand is a relatively young nation first colonized by the Maori people at the beginning of the second millennium. The first European immigrants arrived centuries later and in 1840 the European settlers and the Maori chiefs signed the Treaty of Waitangi, which laid the foundation for the multi-cultural society of New Zealand today (King, 2003). Within this multi-cultural society, the Europeans and the Maori found each other in the sport of rugby, and this game has grown to become the national sport of New Zealand (Higham & Hall, 2003). Although the different rugby leagues (Super 14, Air New Zealand Cup, Heartland Cup) and certain teams (All Blacks, Vodafone Warriors) are the strongest players in the domestic sport entertainment market, different smaller sport leagues have found their niche in the market and are able to survive. One of these sport leagues was the professional female netball league, called the National Bank Cup (National Bank Cup tribute book, 2007). Traditionally, within New Zealand society, women were not supposed to participate in rugby because of its violent nature and were therefore directed towards more "feminine" sports such as field hockey and netball (Nauright & Chandler, 1996). Netball is a game in which physical contact is kept to a minimum and is the most widely practiced sport for women in New Zealand (SPARC, 2001). Because of its popularity, the national association Netball New Zealand formed a female professional league of 10 teams in 1997. The teams, each representing their own region, competed for the first National Bank Cup--a historic move in New Zealand to promote the burgeoning sport. However, much like other professional women's leagues around the world (e.g., WUSA, PVL, etc.), they have struggled with sustainability. In 1999 and 2004, the league dropped two teams, and in 2007 the reformatted six-team league saw its last season as the National Bank Cup (National Bank Cup tribute book, 2007). Beginning in 2008, the league was again pared down (now consisting of only five teams), which will compete in a transnational league combining New Zealand teams with several teams from neighboring Australia. With this move, the netball league is following other leagues that have some format of transnational competition within their league, such as basketball (New Zealand Breakers compete in the NBL), rugby league (Vodafone Warriors compete in the NRL), and football (Wellington Phoenix compete in the A-League). The data was collected during the 2006 season of the National Bank Cup among five of the eight netball franchises.

Research Design

This research was completed through several stages. In the first stage, the purpose was to create a list of associations the managers had in their minds while marketing their team. Managers of each of the eight teams were approached and asked to cooperate with this study. Five teams agreed to do so, providing a response rate of 62.5%. The managers were asked to provide a list of personality adjectives that they felt their brand is currently associated with. They were sent the following message:

 Brand personality theory is based on the idea
 that people attach human characteristics to a
 brand in order to give meaning to the product.
 Managers anticipate on this notion by providing
 these human characteristics to their product in
 their marketing strategies. You probably have your
 own set of adjectives that you would like to have
 people associate with your netball team. In order
 to examine your brand more effectively among
 your fans, we would like you to share these adjectives
 with us. Please think carefully about your
 choice of words, and see this exercise as a way to
 position your netball team on the market.

Because they are partly responsible for the creation of the personality, it is argued that they can create a better list of adjectives associated with the brand than any set factor model. Five of the eight franchises agreed to cooperate, and their managers were sent a short questionnaire in which they were asked to rank the personality characteristics they thought were associated with their brand (sport team). Using a variation on the Psychological Meaning listing technique (Friedmann, 1986), these five managers were asked to list the associations. While Friedmann requires a time limit on the responses, the managers did not have such a limit. Since the communication with them went through email, they were free to take as much time as they needed before they returned the form. No example associations were given, to ensure a free-listing process. Even though the author was unable to check whether it was the manager who filled in the list him/herself, it is safe to assume they did so. Communication through email was between author and manager directly and because of the limited resources within the franchises, neither of the managers had an assistant at their disposal to do this on their behalf. Based on their responses, a final list of 10 characteristics was compiled. The decision to collapse the different lists of the managers was made because of the perceived brand parity of the product, and to ensure a large enough sample of consumers to evaluate the personality compiled by the managers. To control for the validity of the list, the final list of adjectives was sent back to each of the managers for approval and/or comment. Once the managers agreed with the final list stating it was a fair representation on how they perceived their brand, the author was able to move to the next stage.

In the second stage, spectators of home games of the five franchises were asked to evaluate how well the organization represented each of the 10 adjectives. If the author would have asked them to compile their own list of adjectives, he would probably only have been able to look for discongruency with the list provided by the managers and therefore have limited feedback for the managers. However, by giving them a list of set adjectives, the author was able to gain more in-depth knowledge on the perceived brand personality among consumers, and provide the organization with a detailed view on how well they were able to represent the image to their consumers, and how important these associations were to them.

The results of the level of representation were then used to perform an exploratory factor analysis. It is important to note here that it was not the author's intention to create one or more latent variables, consisting out of the different adjectives, rather the objective was to examine what schematic associations the consumers had of the different adjectives and how they would group them together. By exporting the score of these sets of schematics, regression analysis was then performed to discuss how the resulting factors would predict behavioural outcomes such as merchandise sales and attendance.

In the final stage, consumers were asked to rank the adjectives in order of importance to them. Research on brand personality so far has used representativeness as the indicator to create a brand personality and because of the technique they used, they were not able to grasp the importance of the different associations to the consumers. Because the research method in this study resulted in a given (more narrow) set of adjectives, the author was able to collect this data. The author chose to use a forced ranking technique to assess the importance of the brand associations to the consumers. By using forced rankings the author could create a threshold to divide between what consumers perceived to be an important association, and what is not important to them. Following schematic theory it is argued that those associations that are most important to the consumers are the primary associations, while the less important associations are secondary associations. For the purposes of this study, the author created the following threshold: If a majority of the consumers ranked the association in their top five, it was perceived to be important. If this percentage fell below 50%, the association was deemed unimportant. The outcomes of these rankings were then assessed and compared to the representativeness of each item.

Results

Stage 1

First, the managers were asked to compile a list of personality adjectives following the procedures described in the method section. The author was careful not to provide any direction to the managers and ensured the reactions were the result of pure free listing methodology. One of the consequences of this technique was that managers did not stick with the adjectives approach, and came up with more freely associated values. For instance, one of the managers listed 'winners' as an adjective, and another one used 'community.' Since these terms cannot be regarded as adjectives, they were not used, and the author made sure that these terms were accounted for in other adjectives. 'Winners' was represented by 'competitive,' 'community' was reflected in adjectives such as 'warm,' and 'accessible', and 'heart' was reflected by 'passionate.' A final list was compiled (see Table 1) and sent back to the managers for approval. Since some of the managers only mentioned five or six adjectives in their response, it was deemed important they took ownership of the overall list and agreed with the associations listed for all of the teams. Responses to the final list were unanimously positive and no revisions were made, indicating that according to the managers there was a perceived brand parity among teams, and the author could measure brand personality among five different brands, using a single listing.

Stage 2

Once a final list of adjectives was compiled, the resulting survey was then distributed among the spectators of the five different professional netball teams in New Zealand who cooperated in this study (N=323). Questionnaires were given out to spectators prior to games. They were allowed to take the questionnaire with them, and return it to assigned drop boxes at the exit gates. It was acknowledged that this might have a negative effect on the response rate (many questionnaires were left behind in the stands, not filled out), but since this study was part of an overall consumer behavior study, the researchers wanted to provide the respondents with sufficient time to fill out the survey. One of the consequences of this strategy was that the researchers had to eliminate 99 respondents who did not fill out the survey completely, leading to a total sample of 224 respondents. The mean age of the respondents was 33 years, and on average they attended 2.7 games a season. Ninety-five percent of the respondents were female, only 12 of the 224 respondents were men. This is fairly representative of the overall population as most spectators of these events are mothers who attend these games with their daughters.

The next step was to assess how well the spectators felt the brand represented each one of the adjectives. They were asked to rate the representativeness of the adjective by the brand based on a 1 to 7 scale, with 1 indicating a poor fit, 4 being the point of indifference, and 7 indicating a strong fit (Table 1).

All mean scores were well above the point of indifference, indicating that in general, the fans agreed to the representativeness of the different associations and that the netball league teams do an adequate job marketing their brand to the fans. An exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was performed to examine the schematic associations the consumers had between the different associations. Two factors were apparent from the EFA (Table 2), one clustering around associations that are directly related to elite sport and the emotions resulting from the game, a second clustering was formed around more generic associations that were more event related.

The scores of the factor analysis were then exported to independent scores, and these scores (Factor 1: Game related, and Factor 2: Event related) were used to predict game attendance and merchandise sales implementing regression analysis. The individual teams were coded as dummy variables. Combined, the two factors were able to predict only 5 % of the variance in merchandise sales, but only the event-related factor appeared to have a significant Beta score (B: .174, p = .01), suggesting that it was those factors the clubs were the least representative of, that could predict merchandise sales. When the two factors were used to predict attendance, a similar pattern came through. Only 10.3 % of the variance in attendance was explained by the two factors, and it was again only the factor of the event adjectives that had a significant level of prediction (B: .118, p = .067).

The next step was to assess the importance the spectators attached to each one of the adjectives. Table 3 provides an overview of how important the different adjectives were to the respondents. Column 1 reflects the overall ranking of the adjectives. To ensure that this list of importance was similar across all five teams incorporated in this study, the individual team scores were examined to check for differences between the teams. The researcher proposed that the top five adjectives were important to the respondent, and the ranking was compiled by using the percentage of the population who ranked that particular adjective in their top five.

The respondents appeared to have a very clear view on the importance of the different adjectives to them, and this list is similar across all teams. The two factors that were apparent in the factor analysis (game-related and event-related factors) were classified similar when asked about their importance. The game-related variables were all valued by their spectators as being important (with the exception of proud for team 2 and 4, following the majority rule stated earlier in the methods section), while the event-related variables (accessible, warm, cool, and attractive) were at the bottom of the list for all five teams.

Discussion

The method used in this study to examine brand personality associations allowed the researchers to not only capture the perceived personality associations of the brand, in addition it provided the researchers with valuable insights on both the organization's ability to represent that particular association, as well as capturing the relative importance of those associations to a particular set of consumers. It has to be noted that this set of consumers was predominantly female, which does limit our ability to generalize the data. Since the purpose of this article was to explore a new method to measure brand personality associations among consumers, this should not be detrimental to the findings of this study.

One of the few studies on brand personality in the field of sport management was performed by Smith et al. (2006), and illustrated some of the issues raised in this study. They used Aaker's brand personality scale to evaluate the brand of an Australian female netball team, and they found that the team's brand personality was strongly associated with competence, sincerity, and innovation (a new dimension they explored), moderately associated with excitement, and it had low associations with both sophistication and ruggedness. It is questionable what the added value of these findings is for marketing managers of netball teams, and it cannot be surprising to the managers that their team brand had a strong association with competence and sincerity, while scoring low on both sophistication and ruggedness. It is argued that the results found in this study provides the managers a much more in-depth view of how their brand is perceived among their consumers.

Based on the organizations' ability to represent the different associations, the overall list of associations could be divided in two distinct sets of associations, game related and event related. A similar distinction between game-related associations and event-related associations was apparent when the consumers were forced to rank the associations based on importance. The least important adjectives as perceived by the spectators was the set of event-related adjectives that reflect the community feel of the event (warm, accessible), and the two adjectives of cool and attractive. That both cool and attractive end up being the lowest scoring adjectives on both the representation ranking as well as the importance ranking is not surprising considering the demographic of the spectators (mother/daughter). The fact that attractive received low values might have to do with the fact that the respondents connected this with the players (who are of the same sex as they are), rather than with the game (see the high score for exciting). What is surprising though is that it was the less important event-related associations that had a significant level of prediction on consumer behavior, such as merchandise sales and overall attendance, while the game-related associations seen as most important by the consumers did not predict attendance and merchandise sales at all.

Managerial Implications

The purpose of this study was to propose a new technique to assist managers to examine the brand personality associations of an organization. It is argued that the brand personality scale developed by Aaker (1997) lacks validity, creates a sense of anthropomorphism, fails to acknowledge the power of the marketers to manipulate the perception of the brand personality associations by the consumers, and is not usable outside its primary setting. Rather than developing a new factor scale, it is proposed that it is more useful to have managers develop their own list of brand personality adjectives. Since managers "own" and manipulate the brand personality, they have the most reliable insight on what associations are related to the brand. This list was then used to examine importance to the consumers, as well as measuring the representativeness of the organization towards these adjectives. This technique does not necessarily attempt to capture the personality of the brand; instead it focuses on the gap between the perceived brand personality by the manager and the consumer. Measuring the gap between these two perceptions is a much stronger indication of the success of the marketing strategy than using the brand personality scale as developed by Aaker (1997). Results indicate spectators have a strong preference in what they believe is important to the brand, as well as the level of representation of the association by the organization. However, when those perceptions are then used to predict self-reported merchandise sales and attendance, it was those associations that were regarded as unimportant that were significant.

The two-stage brand personality approach provides managers with a more accurate instrument to evaluate their consumers perception of the brand, and gives in-depth information on what is important to the consumers, as well as how strongly the organization represents the chosen association.

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Bob Heere

Bob Heere, PhD, is an assistant professor of kinesiology & health education at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include social identity, community development, international sport management issues, and branding.

Table 1. Strength of the Representation of the Adjectives

 Mean Score SD 95% C.I. of the difference

 Lower Upper

Competitive 6.51 1.01 6.38 6.64
Exciting 6.34 1.16 6.20 6.49
Professional 6.41 1.09 6.27 6.54
Dynamic 6.19 1.10 6.05 6.33
Passionate 6.20 1.29 6.04 6.36
Proud 6.28 1.25 6.13 6.44
Accessible 5.68 1.41 5.50 5.86
Warm 5.50 1.46 5.31 5.68
Cool 5.32 1.73 5.10 5.54
Attractive 4.81 1.83 4.58 5.05

Note: All t-values were significant at p < .01

Table 2. Exploratory Factor Analysis.

 Components
 1 2

Eigenvalues 5.481 1.405
Variance explained 43.211 25.650

 Variables Factor loadings

Competitive .896 .086
Professional .859 .212
Exciting .824 .259
Dynamic .815 .237
Proud .786 .316
Passionate .747 .360
Cool .215 .783
Warm .243 .776
Attractive .094 .770
Accessible .382 .592

Table 3.
Order of Importance of the Adjectives

 Overall Team 1 Team 2 Team 3 Team 4 Team 5
 mean score Percentage of people who regarded
 (1=highest this adjective as being important
 10=lowest)

Competitive 2.29 82.2 87.5 88.1 87.7 83.3
Exciting 3.62 75.6 82.1 75.8 84.2 79.2
Professional 3.87 71.1 75.0 79.0 82.5 83.3
Dynamic 4.63 60.0 73.2 74.2 68.4 75.0
Passionate 4.83 57.8 53.6 59.7 63.2 66.7
Proud 5.12 60.0 48.2 59.7 47.4 50.0
Accessible 6.30 31.1 41.1 29.0 24.6 29.2
Warm 7.30 22.2 19.6 14.5 12.3 20.8
Cool 7.74 24.4 12.5 9.7 19.3 20.8
Attractive 8.62 15.6 10.7 9.7 12.5 16.7