Aaker’s brand personality scale (BPS), rooted in the big five personality traits theory has previously been used in studying how commercial brands are perceived with a view to helping the people marketing those brands engage more putative customers and clients. Now, M. Mutsikiwa and T. Maree of the Department of Marketing Management at the University of Pretoria in South Africa have applied BPS to the well-known online brands of Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn.
Brand personality applies human-like characteristics to brands and attempts to offer business owners and marketers a way to conceptualise and perhaps even anthropomorphise the products and services they are hoping to sell. Now, writing in the International Journal of Internet Marketing and Advertising, the team suggests from their analysis that these online, or digital, brands, do not stick to the BPS rules as set out for more conventional brands and products.
Other researchers in this sphere are quoted by the team: “One of the motivations for creating brand personalities is that attractive brand personalities could potentially lead to long-term relationships between the brand and its consumers”, “Commonly, human personality traits are transferred to brands via advertising”, and “direct contact with a brand may also be instrumental in creating brand personality, as it forms in the mind of the consumer due to how the consumer perceives the brand.” This sets the tone for the new insights into BPS of digital brands.
Based on their study, the team concludes that all three social media tools are to some extent seen as featuring excitement as a “personality” trait. Facebook and YouTube also share the characteristic of sincerity. In the light of recent revelations about social media’s role in politics and other walks of life, it would be interesting to know whether the association with that trait has changed in recent months since this research was undertaken. The team adds that LinkedIn appears unique among the social media in this research in that it prominently features the “competence” personality trait.
The association of human personality traits with social media that is not seen to such a degree in other brands, suggests that the social media platforms themselves are somehow perceived as being more “human” in nature than conventional brands and product categories. This is perhaps an inevitable consequence of social media being so obviously social and the “product” being the people who use the platforms.
Mutsikiwa, M. and Maree, T. (2019) ‘Exploring the brand personalities of Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn’, Int. J. Internet Marketing and Advertising, Vol. 13, No. 4, pp.285–301.
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