Consumer's Sport Preference as a Predictor for His/Her Response to Brand Personality

摘要

1 Introduction The increasing competition in saturated markets drives companies to adopt highly sophisticated communication mix strategies. This is the case especially for categories of products that possess similar physical attributes, e.g., sport shoes. For these products, the brand attribute constitutes a key driver affecting consumers' final purchase decision. However, what affects consumers' choice of a specific branded product? Wright [11] has claimed that consumers often tend to choose a product that arouses the most positive brand affect rather than taking certain product attributes into account. Hence, recent literature has focused on central drivers for (positive) brand affects, i.e., constructs that arouse positive brand emotions such as joy or happiness. In this context, brand personality has been identified as a central driver for affective brand loyalty, which encompasses the abovementioned brand-related emotions. Brand personality could be described according to a person's personality and therefore refers to personality characteristics, e.g., trustworthiness and activity, that are associated with the brand. Recent studies have revealed that consumers prefer brands that are aligned with their own personality traits (e.g., Mulyanegara et al. [7]). Because brand personality is created by a company's communication mix, companies may explore the personality traits of their target market segments and attach the corresponding personality traits to their brand. However, focusing on consumers' personality traits for market segmentation (i.e., market evaluation) is challenging since personality traits are not directly observable.