A New Methodological Approach for Creating and Visualizing Brand Personalities

Branding came from the practice of branding cattle with symbols, to identify their owners. In the same sense, branding is intended to educate people about the products and services businesses offer. It puts a mark that recognizes the producer of a certain product or a service, and then communicate this mark to consumers, while initiating an intimate rapport with them. The mark that started as a means to avoid forgery, expanded after the post-war consumer explosion, as people started to identify the role of branding in selling products and services to the masses.

Today, branding plays an important role in defining and differentiating businesses in the marketplace. In order to fulfill this role, brands must attain a deep and profound understanding of their true essences, and to what they stand for. Brands pay constant attention and consideration of their past and present, and then, develop their cohesive personalities which possess charisma and magnetism that engage people. The most important factor here, is how brands can capture the emotions that people experience and indulge them into their brand personas, whilst also representing their core values, and their points of differentiation.



Aaker* developed a five-dimensional framework for measuring brand personalities called the “Big Five”. The big fives in the model were; sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication and ruggedness. Aaker’s model didn’t exceed creating the personality, and didn’t suggest a way to visualize it. On contrary, this research paper suggests a new methodological approach, an approach that addresses the path towards creating-and-visualizing brand personalities.