Until recently the idea that we see brands as human beings and assign them human personality characteristics was only tested using questionnaires.
Subjecting someone to such a questionnaire is already based on the assumption that we do actually see brands as people.
This is why scientists from the University of California and National Taiwan University asked a question whether we really store brand personalities in our brain and if yes, where. Their study was published in the recent issue of the Journal of Marketing Research.
The researchers exposed participants to 50 well known brand logos while performing fMRIs to record brain activity. They have also administered the brand personality questionnaire (Aaker, 1997) to see whether there was an agreement between participants on the brand personalities of all 50 shown brands. That questionnaire was also completed by another group of participants (demographically different), who didn’t take part in the neuroimaging study, to see whether the brand personalities were widely shared.
They did find that particular brand personalities were shared by all participants showing that regardless of demographic differences, all participants assigned similar personality characteristics to the brands. This study was performed on 50 widely known brands (e.g. Apple, Google, Jack Daniels, Nike, IKEA and Coca-Cola) and hence the result might be different with less known and more regional brands.
What was even more interesting however is that as predicted, the researchers were able to see the brain activity which proves that we do store brand personality in our brain. It is sort of a mental model of a brand which gets activated when we are exposed to that brand.
However, there is no one single place in the brain where a particular brand personality is stored but rather the brain activity is visible in areas responsible for semantics, imagery and emotions.
‘We found that our activations were distributed across several types of cognitive functions but particularly those implicated in previous studies of semantic knowledge (inferior frontal gyrus), imagery (premotor and visual cortex), and emotional processing (anterior and posterior cingulated gyrus), consistent with the notion that brand knowledge consists of a complex mix of thoughts, images, and feelings that consumers associate with brands.’
What was even more revolutionary is that each brand had a particular map of brain activity which therefore allows the researchers to predict what brand a person is thinking of! Imagine that! One day, we will have a library of brain activity for each brand personality and will be able to see which brand a person is thinking of while shopping in the supermarket and what to do to persuade them otherwise! But it’s long way to go and we still need to understand a lot more about brand representations in our brain.
For example, as the research used already known brands, it does not show us how the brand personality is actually created in the brain. However, from the studies on human personality as well as other studies on brand personality we know that all that we perceive about the brand through all of our senses, all our interactions with that brand as well as a social influence can help shape a brand personality.
The question is also, once it is shaped and recorded in particular parts of our brain, what are the activities which can change or affect this brand personality?! This study gives us a first step to finding a reply. By recording the mental map of a particular brand personality, we can then see how various actions affect that model; if at all.
The problem which marketers are always faced with is: What a customer really thinks about our brand and what do they really want? For a while now we know that majority of a quantitative and qualitative methods are not reliable as they are based on conscious mental processing which has hardly anything to do with the actual purchase decision.
This is why recently an array of psychological and neuroscientific methods have been widely applied to consumer research. Although using fMRI is still outside of the research budget for many brands, this study is the first step to new opportunities for marketers to understand how a brand is really seen by the consumers.
