I watched a Hollywood movie last weekend where a teacher asked their high-school students to do a perception exercise. He names a few companies and asks them to close their eyes for a minute or two and imagine their personality if that company were a person. To compare and contrast, he throws names like Apple and Ford. I would not get into the details of what the response was. If interested, the movie’s name was Immortal, and you can watch it on Prime Video. But just watching that scene made me realize how accurate that exercise was.

Brands of companies are like personalities. Innovative, reliable, archaic, and legacy are examples of terms we use to describe many brands. What we are actually attributing to are the brand personalities. It is, therefore, critical for companies to understand what type of brand personality they currently have so that they can work on changing their personalities if required.

In this two-part article, we will first explore what brand personality means for an organization in part 1. In the second part, we will explore how AI can help transform how organizations can reshape their brand personality. The second part of this article will be published on 01/05.

Brand Personality Evaluation

To put it most straightforwardly, brand personality for a company is essentially a set of human characteristics attributed to a brand name. Examples are excitement, sincerity, innovation, creativity, ruggedness, competence, legacy, and sophistication. An important point to note is that brand personality differs from brand imagery, even though brand imagery should reflect a company’s personality.

Brand personality tracking approaches are pretty rudimentary currently. Sentiment analysis is often leveraged to track brand mentions along with a crude measure of sentiment associated with the brand in the mention. These measures, though better than nothing, are essentially not precise.

These measures of a brand’s personality do not easily reconcile with the typical dimensions of human personality as measured by popular individual personality tests like the Big 5. The Big 5 personality traits have robust psychometric validation, are pretty universal in their applicability, and lend themselves to statistically validated measurement.

The scales are well understood, and measurement is along this scale. And the good news is that by leveraging AI, you can use tests like Big 5 for testing brand personality as well. Before we jump into that, let us overview the Big 5 test.

Big 5 Test

The Big 5 personality traits seem universal and cut across cultures and geographies. It is widely believed that these traits may have genetic origins and have even shaped our social evolution. Human twins have suggested significant inheritance of Big 5’s five traits in many studies. This may validate that there are biological and genetic predispositions for these traits. Studies also suggest that these traits remain stable in adulthood with no statistical changes despite significant life events.

The Big 5 test essentially captures five personality archetypes. Those 5 archetypes are:

• New Experiences and Openness
• Orderly Progression and Conscientiousness
• Positivity, Talkability, and Extraversion
• Collaboration, Harmony, and Agreeableness
• Emotional Volatility and Neuroticism

Note that the five personality factors listed above represent a range between two extremes. The brand personality is a scale between the two extremes of the five factors. For humans, it is easy to score across this range based on questions. For example, we know exactly if we agree or disagree with the question: “I thrive in social situations and enjoy being the center of attention” (1 is strongly disagree and 5 is strongly agree). To leverage an approach like this for brand personality scoring, we need to interpret the score based on specific inputs or analysis.This is where AI can help. In the second part of this article, we will explore how AI can help address this challenge.