Brand personality: How to make the metaphor fit?

The Big Five Model of human personality [Goldberg, 1990, J. Pers, Sec. Psyc hol. 59, 1216] reduces the large number of adjectives describing human pers onalities to only five latent dimensions (the so-called Big Five Factors of Extroversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, and O penness), which provide a consensual framework for classifying and organizi ng descriptors of human personality. This paper examines 12 mass-market bra nds to determine to what extent, in a consumer setting, the Big Five can se rve as a metaphor to describe enduring characteristics of brands. More than 1500 subjects evaluated their own personalities and those of three brands by using 40 adjectives (8 for each trait) typical of the dimensions of huma n personality according to the Big Five Factor Model. Results from explorat ory factor analyses showed that the five-factor structure is not replicated when describing brands. Rather, at a higher level of abstraction in the hi erarchical organization of personality characteristics, results supported a two-trait solution, It was also found that descriptors of human personalit y convey different meanings when attributed to different brands. While the psycholexical approach remains a suitable procedure to identify brand descr iptors, the factors used to describe human personalities appear to be inapp ropriate for describing the brands studied here. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.