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March 17, 2015 Does the Idea of Brand Personality Have Anything to Do with Reality? To test a hunch that a well-known research tool for identifying brand “personalities” might produce spurious results, researchers from New Zealand and the UK asked university students to use the tool to identify the personalities of three rocks. The students did indeed ascribe personalities to the rocks, rating one, for example, as low in sophistication (2.20 on a 1-to-5 scale) and another as high in competence (3.47). Thus the tool appears not to measure brand-personality perceptions so much as create them, says the research team, led by Mark Avis of Massey University in New Zealand. SOURCE: The brand personality of rocks: A critical evaluation of a brand personality scale

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