Brand personality dimensions of Nike sportswear -an empirical analysis

In today’s competitive marketplace several sportswear brands exist. These sportswear brands offer their products at best of prices, services and quality. In such a scenario it is becoming very difficult for consumers to differentiate between the products available in the same product category. Brand personality thus plays a vital role by enabling the consumers to evaluate the products, by making the brands more distinctive and enduring. The purpose of this paper is to identify the brand personality dimensions of Nike sportswear brand by using Aaker’s brand personality scale. The second purpose of this study is to find out how the brand personality of Nike sportswear brand formed. The data were collected from 300 University of Bahrain students studying in Bahrain. In order to analyze the data, factor analysis and multiple regression techniques were applied. The results indicated that four brand personality dimensions were extracted for Nike sportswear brand named as Competence, Sincerity, Sophistication and Excitement. The factors forming the brand personality of Nike were Logo, User Imagery and Advertisement Style. The findings of this study will enable the marketing practitioners to better understand the personality of Nike sportswear brand from the minds of consumers and better distinguish Nike brand from their competitors. Corresponding author: Abdulsattar Alazzawi Email addresses for the corresponding author: sattar602000@yahoo.com First submission received: 25th September 2018 Revised submission received: 22nd February 2019 Accepted: 25th March 2019 Introduction 21st century is an era of branded products particularly among the youths of the countries that purchase products not only for their physiological need but for their emotional and self-expressive benefits. In today’s market scenario homogeneity prevails among the products and it is becoming very easy to replace the products with that of the competitors. Therefore, it has become vital to look for differences among the products. This point of differentiation can be attained by developing a distinctive and enduring brand personality. Brand personality is defined as the set of human characteristics associated with a brand (Aaker, 1997). A distinctive brand personality helps in creating a set of unique and favourable associations in consumers’ memory (Adamantios., 2004; Johnson., 2000; Keller, 1993). In this study the sportswear industry is taken into consideration where the top sportswear brands such as Nike, Adidas, Puma and Reebok are competitively striving to build their brands in a way to attain maximum market share. In the formation of brand personality of sportswear brands, the marketing activities such as advertising, celebrity endorsements, events sponsorship, user imagery etc. play important roles. All marketing activities and brand management decisions trigger attitudinal, cognitive, and behavioural responses on the part of the consumer and their buying decision. It has been found that many studies have been devoted to brand personality (Okazaki, 2006; Supphellen & Gronhaug, 2003; Venable & Rose, 2003) in which the main focus has been to study the effect of brand personality or the issues of measuring brand personality. However, there is very limited research on brand personality in the case of sportswear brands and on the factors, which form brand personality. The concept of brand personality has drawn attention of academics for over a decade. Although practitioners of advertising have used the concept for at least two decades, academic research on brand personality gained momentum after the publication of Jennifer Aaker’s article on the topic in 1997. Since Journal of Business and Retail Management Research (JBRMR), Vol. 13 Issue 4 July 2019 www.jbrmr.com A Journal of the Academy of Business and Retail Management (ABRM) 202 then, a large number of papers have been published on various aspects of brand personality. The body of work is now large enough for undertaking an analysis of the research methods that have been used. No such analysis has been published in the branding literature till date; therefore, a review of the methods used in brand personality research will be useful for researchers who are planning new studies in this field. This paper is based on a survey and analysis of peer reviewed journal articles on brand personality which were available in full text form on online databases. The survey is exploratory in nature. We begin with an overview of brand personality research followed by an overview of methods that have been used in brand personality research. The classification scheme used for classifying research methods is discussed and the findings about research methods used are then presented. The concept of personality is well established in the psychology literature. People are often described by adjectives which denote characteristic ways in which humans respond to their environment. Research in psychology has identified five dimensions or factors which can be used to describe human beings (Goldberg, 1990). These five uncorrelated factors identified as Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism and Openness to experience have also been termed as Big-Five factors (Paonen, 2003). It has been found that people can differ significantly on their scores on each of these five dimensions. The concept of brand personality has been used by marketing practitioners and academics. Advertising practitioners have applied the concept of brand personality in their quest for improving the impact and effectiveness of brand related communication. Plummer (1984) suggested that one of the ways in which brands can be described is through characterization and that these characterizations can be termed as the brand’s personality. The academic literature on branding contains references to the concept of brand personality and the view of the brand as a person. Kapeferer (1994) proposed a brand identity model in which personality was one of six faces of a brand identity prism. In this model, personality denotes the character of the brand and the way the brand would speak of the product or service if it were a person. Another brand identity model (Aaker and Joachimsthaler, 2000) includes brand as a person as a specific construct of brand identity. This construct of brand as a person includes two categoriespersonality and customer/brand relationships. The consumer behavior literature also discusses brand personality. Allen and Olson (1995) define brand personality as the set of specific meanings which describe the brand’s inner characteristics. Fournier (1995) has suggested that consumers can perceive brands as partners having specific traits, with traits being inferred based on marketing and communication activities of the brand. Academic research in brand personality has gained momentum after Aaker’s (1997) article in which she presented a scientifically developed scale for measuring brand personality. Aaker first developed a scale consisting of 42 items which loaded on to five dimensions Sincerity, Excitement, Competence, Sophistication and Ruggedness. Aaker’s (1997) brand personality scale has been used either on its own or in conjunction with other scale items for research on brand personality in several countries –Spain and Japan (Aaker , 2001), Chile (Rojas-Mendes , 2004), Korea (Yongjun Sung and Tinkham, 2005), Australia (Smith , 2006), Germany (Zentes , 2008) and India (Thomas and Sekhar, 2008). Researchers using Aaker’s (1997) scale in other countries have found that the five dimensions have been validated in the United States are not replicated in other countries. Aaker (2001) discovered that in Japan it was necessary to replace the Ruggedness with a new dimension labeled Peacefulness, while in Spain it was necessary to replace the Ruggedness and Competence dimensions with new dimensions labeled Peacefulness and Passion. In a study of the Ford brand personality in Chile, Rojas-Mendes (2003) found that the Ruggedness dimension was neither reliable nor valid. Yongjun Sung and Tinkham (2005) examined respondents’ perceptions of the personalities of global brands in Korea and US and found that two dimensions unique to Korea Passive Likeableness and Ascendancy were needed to explain the brand personality structure. Other studies like Zentes (2008) and Thomas and Sekhar (2008) have found it necessary to modify the Aaker (1997) scale. Geuens, Weijters and DeWulf (2009) describe a new brand personality scale that is reliable at the level of category, brand and respondent, and is valid across several countries in Europe. Journal of Business and Retail Management Research (JBRMR), Vol. 13 Issue 4 July 2019 www.jbrmr.com A Journal of the Academy of Business and Retail Management (ABRM) 203 A variety of methods has been used in brand personality research. Researchers have used qualitative methods, experiments, and surveys to obtain data. Different types of samples have like convenience samples, student samples, representative samples, online panels, consumer samples and expert samples have been used. Data has been analysed using a variety of techniques ranging from simple t-tests, to correlation, regression and Factor analysis. The following sections provide details of a review of methods used in brand personality research based on a study of selected journal articles on brand personality. The main purpose of this study is to find out brand personality dimensions of Nike sportswear and the factors forming its brand personality of Nike sportswear. Literature review Brand Personality The emergence and development of brand is not a modern phenomenon, but it existed since time immemorial. Brands were used to differentiate goods of one manufacturer from the other. According to De Cheratony (1998) today’s brand consists of tangible and product related attributes as well as intangible, nonproduct related characteristics (the added value). The