Comparing the personality of three well-known sporting brands in Iran
Mohmood Mohammadian* and Hamidreza Asgari Dehabadi
Brands have a history that goes back to long before the development of modern marketing. Brands should be understood as an institutional embodiment of the logic of a new form of informational capital – much like the factory embodied the logic of industrial capital. Brand management is a matter of putting to work the capacity of consumers and increasingly other kinds of actors to create a common social world through autonomous processes of communication and interaction. This capacity to produce a common social world is empowered and programmed to unfold in ways, which create the measurable kinds of attention, which underpin the commercial values of brands.
Brand management involves the adaptation of a brand to changes in the market and to maintain the meaning of a brand, adjustments in brand positioning does not have to affect the perceived essence of a brand. Ideally, such adjustments reinforce the meaning of a brand, and shed new light on existing brand features (Keller, 2003). Brand managers are normally facing the challenge of adapting their
brands without diluting its essence. This is not easy, as illustrated by the introduction of Harley Davidson fragrances, which alienated loyal customers who could not link fragrances to Harleyrsquo;s core features of ruggedness and masculinity (Haig, 2003).
One of the most important motivations for applying brand management to a consumer product or service is considered as competition. As the number of similar products or services in the marketplace increases, we need for more differentiated brands and with a rise in competition, there is often a similar rise in the speed of measuring brand performance in the marketplace. In an information-rich environment, impatient retailers usually discard brands, which do not deliver consistent and profitable sales. The same is considered for the survival of a television network or program in an ever-increasing competitive environment.
Brands are symbols around including firms, suppliers, supplementary organizations, the public, customers and even nations construct. Branding is a critical issue in international marketing because brands permit actors, such as organizations, individuals and indeed countries to express their opinions in foreign markets in different ways, where even language does not convey. Brands have been the focus of significant focus in the international marketing literature, where researchers have addressed such issues as the differences between international and local brands (e.g. Schuiling amp; Kapferer, 2004), global brand equity (Hsieh, 2004), and international brand counterfeiting (Green amp; Smith, 2004; Gillespie, Krishna, amp; Jarvis, 2002).
Today, Adidas, Nike and Puma are well-known brands in Iran and these brands were selected for this study since they are considered as important sporting brands in Iran. Consistently superior quality, continuing innovation, and value-for-money products emerging out of the advanced technology employed, have enabled these brands to be as lsquo;The Most Trusted Brandrsquo; in sporting goods in Iran.
There is a lack of research in the Iranian context specifically exploring the applicability of Jennifer Aakerrsquo;s Brand Personality Scale on sporting goods. Nevertheless, the competition in many industries has intensified with the globalization and import of foreign goods in Iran. Hence, building of brands plays an important role for competing firms. In such a scenario, systematic research aimed at measuring and validating the Jennifer Aakerrsquo;s Brand Personality Scale is of utmost importance for brand managers and advertising agencies.
2. Theoretical background
The work of Aaker (1997) inspired the majority of the research on brand personality to date. She meticulously developed a 44-item Brand Personality Scale, which encompasses five broad dimensions: Sincerity, Excitement, Competence, Sophistication, and Ruggedness. The scale has served as a brand personality measure in many studies, and its factor structure proved to be robust in many of these studies (Aaker, 1997, 1999; Aaker et al., 2001; Kim et al., 2001). However, Aaker#39;s scale has recently been criticized on several grounds. The first one is associated with weak definition of brand personality, which includes several other characteristics such as age, gender, etc. in addition to personality (Azoulay amp; Kapferer, 2003; Bosnjak, Bochmann, amp;Hufschmidt, 2007). This induces a construct validity problem and leaves researchers and practitioners uncertain of what they have actually measured: the perceived brand personality (a sender aspect) or perceived user characteristics (receiver aspects).
The other vital issue is related to non -generalizability of the factor structure to investigate the respondent level for a specific brand or within a particular product category (Austin et al., 2003). Since Aaker (1997) performed all analyses on information gathered across respondents for between-brand comparisons and removed all within-brand variance, which led to factor analysis results exclusively based on between-brand variance. As a result, the framework does not appear to
M. Mohammadian and H. Askari / Management Science Letters 2 (2012) 1771
generalize to situations in which analyses are requested at the individual brand level and/or situations in which consumers are elements of differentiation.
Another issue was associated with the non-replicability of the five factors cross-culturally (Azoulay amp; Kapferer, 2003). For example, Aaker et al. (2001) reported that only three of the five factors used in Spain namely, Sincerity, Excitement, and Sophistication. This shortcoming led several researchers to construct a country-specific brand personality scale. Bosnjak et al. (2007) developed
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Comparing the personality of three well-known sporting brands in Iran
Mohmood Mohammadian* and Hamidreza Asgari Dehabadi
Brands have a history that goes back to long before the development of modern marketing. Brands should be understood as an institutional embodiment of the logic of a new form of informational capital – much like the factory embodied the logic of industrial capital. Brand management is a matter of putting to work the capacity of consumers and increasingly other kinds of actors to create a common social world through autonomous processes of communication and interaction. This capacity to produce a common social world is empowered and programmed to unfold in ways, which create the measurable kinds of attention, which underpin the commercial values of brands.
Brand management involves the adaptation of a brand to changes in the market and to maintain the meaning of a brand, adjustments in brand positioning does not have to affect the perceived essence of a brand. Ideally, such adjustments reinforce the meaning of a brand, and shed new light on existing brand features (Keller, 2003). Brand managers are normally facing the challenge of adapting their
brands without diluting its essence. This is not easy, as illustrated by the introduction of Harley Davidson fragrances, which alienated loyal customers who could not link fragrances to Harleyrsquo;s core features of ruggedness and masculinity (Haig, 2003).
One of the most important motivations for applying brand management to a consumer product or service is considered as competition. As the number of similar products or services in the marketplace increases, we need for more differentiated brands and with a rise in competition, there is often a similar rise in the speed of measuring brand performance in the marketplace. In an information-rich environment, impatient retailers usually discard brands, which do not deliver consistent and profitable sales. The same is considered for the survival of a television network or program in an ever-increasing competitive environment.
Brands are symbols around including firms, suppliers, supplementary organizations, the public, customers and even nations construct. Branding is a critical issue in international marketing because brands permit actors, such as organizations, individuals and indeed countries to express their opinions in foreign markets in different ways, where even language does not convey. Brands have been the focus of significant focus in the international marketing literature, where researchers have addressed such issues as the differences between international and local brands (e.g. Schuiling amp; Kapferer, 2004), global brand equity (Hsieh, 2004), and international brand counterfeiting (Green amp; Smith, 2004; Gillespie, Krishna, amp; Jarvis, 2002).
Today, Adidas, Nike and Puma are well-known brands in Iran and these brands were selected for this study since they are considered as important sporting brands in Iran. Consistently superior quality, continuing innovation, and value-for-money products emerging out of the advanced technology employed, have enabled these brands to be as lsquo;The Most Trusted Brandrsquo; in sporting goods in Iran.
There is a lack of research in the Iranian context specifically exploring the applicability of Jennifer Aakerrsquo;s Brand Personality Scale on sporting goods. Nevertheless, the competition in many industries has intensified with the globalization and import of foreign goods in Iran. Hence, building of brands plays an important role for competing firms. In such a scenario, systematic research aimed at measuring and validating the Jennifer Aakerrsquo;s Brand Personality Scale is of utmost importance for brand managers and advertising agencies.
2. Theoretical background
The work of Aaker (1997) inspired the majority of the research on brand personality to date. She meticulously developed a 44-item Brand Personality Scale, which encompasses five broad dimensions: Sincerity, Excitement, Competence, Sophistication, and Ruggedness. The scale has served as a brand personality measure in many studies, and its factor structure proved to be robust in many of these studies (Aaker, 1997, 1999; Aaker et al., 2001; Kim et al., 2001). However, Aaker#39;s scale has recently been criticized on several grounds. The first one is associated with weak definition of brand personality, which includes several other characteristics such as age, gender, etc. in addition to personality (Azoulay amp; Kapferer, 2003; Bosnjak, Bochmann, amp;Hufschmidt, 2007). This induces a construct validity problem and leaves researchers and practitioners uncertain of what they have actually measured: the perceived brand personality (a sender aspect) or perceived user characteristics (receiver aspects).
The other vital issue is related to non -generalizability of the factor structure to investigate the respondent level for a specific brand or within a particular product category (Austin et al., 2003). Since Aaker (1997) performed all analyses on information gathered across respondents for between-brand comparisons and removed all within-brand variance, which led to factor analysis results exclusively based on between-brand variance. As a result, the framework does not appear to
M. Mohammadian and H. Askari / Management Science Letters 2 (2012) 1771
generalize to situations in which analyses are requested at the individual brand level and/or situations in which consumers are elements of differentiation.
Another issue was associated with the non-replicability of the five factors cross-culturally (Azoulay amp; Kapferer, 2003). For example, Aaker et al. (2001) reported that only three of the five factors used in Spain namely, Sincerity, Excitement, and Sophistication. This shortcoming led several researchers to construct a country-specific brand personality scale. Bosnjak et al. (2007) developed
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