Topic
How does Brand Personality shape Customer Preference
Instructions
Your individual assignment is to design a dissertation topic – use a topic that you might be interested in researching for your actual dissertation and develop a research proposal and pilot study. The topic you choose to submit for this assignment does not need to be the same as the dissertation you eventually choose. The assignment should demonstrate scholarship, academic rigor, creativity and methodological clarity.
Answer Preview
Several studies confirm the importance of brand association as an element of brand equity for the long-term performance and success (Valette-Florence et al., 2011; Nam et al., 2011; Dissanayake and Amarasuriya, 2015). While the customer decision-making process is not always easy, having emotional associations simplify their inclination towards brands. In particular, emotional associations are critical in simplifying purchasing decisions hen particular results, notably, rewards are expected upon the usage of the products (Su and Tong, 2015.). The emotional associations include perceived quality, product meaning or symbolic meaning (which represents the brand personality. According to Valette-Florence et al. (2011), unique arrays of brand personality traits are useful in building favourability of a brand over the other; that is, customer’s perception of a brand is influenced by associations it creates, ultimately resulting in enhanced brand equity.
Several prior studies focused on brand personality to examine factors that describe the personality traits of a brand. For example, Dissanayake & Amarasuriya (2015) implied that the personality of a brand is a brand equity concept that covers demographic information of customers, including gender, age and class. While this definition is contentious, there is a consensus among many researchers that brand personality, with tangible attributes and benefits as the defining features, is the core to brand equity (Lin, 2015). Many researchers often attempt to examine and understand customer behaviours as the starting point for building brand personalities (Dissanayake and Amarasuriya, 2015). The reason for this is because, according to Toldos-Romero et al. (2015), customers often get involved with brands that demonstrate matching personality traits. Therefore, the extant literature recommends that to create powerful brands, it is critical to establish a substantial emotional connection with customers.
Word Count: 1600