The Impact of Brand Personality on Brand Trust, Affect and Loyalty

Abstract

Brand personality has been viewed as an efficient way to distinguish a brand from its competitors, thereby enhancing the effectiveness of advertising and marketing communications. As a critical part of a company’s marketing program in today’s global market, the brand-personality construct helps both marketing researchers and practitioners to better understand consumers who express themselves through the commercial brands they purchase and use. Given its great potential usability for marketers and brand managers, the current study investigates the determinant roles of brand personality on Chinese consumers’ brand evaluations. This study conceptualizes and investigates the impact of brand personality on brand trust, brand affect, and brand loyalty. The overall findings indicate that different brand personality dimensions influence brand trust and brand affect in different ways, which in turn increase the level of brand loyalty. The results of this study suggest that Sincerity dimensions are more likely to influence the level of brand trust than brand affect, whereas the Excitement, Competence, Sophistication and Ruggedness dimensions relate more to brand affect than to brand trust. The research findings are generally consistent with marketing and consumer researchers’ assertions that brand personality can increase levels of brand trust and evoke brand affect, which in turn builds the level of brand loyalty. Theoretical and practical contributions and implications are discussed in the last part of the thesis.