The Brand Personality Dictionary was designed by Opoku, Abratt and Pitt (2006) using Aaker’s five brand personality dimensions as well as 42 personality trait norms, which are useful for comparing brand personalities across different categories. The Aaker’s five dimensions are: Sincerity; Excitement; Competence; Sophistication; Ruggedness.

In order to build and enrich the brand personality dictionary, the authors searched, with the help of WordStat, for original synonyms for all personality traits as well as synonyms for Aaker’s five dimensions. They come up with a final list of 833 words distributed across Aaker’s five dimensions.

With the assistance of WordStat, words with little semantic value were not included in the dictionary and the stemming function of the software reduced various word forms to a limited set based on their roots (Opoku, Abratt and Pitt, 2006).

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After having pre-tested the brand analysis dictionary, the authors performed a content analysis of 11 business schools websites by using the newly created dictionary. They wanted to find out what brand personality each school features (Opoku, Abratt and Pitt, 2006). Many other authors used this dictionary as is or a customized version of it to analyze brand personality that organizations want to project through marketing. Use (Campbel et al, 2010; Papania et al, 2008; Opoku et al, 2008).

To download the dictionary, click here.

References

• Aaker, J. L. (1997). Dimensions of brand personality. Journal of Marketing Research. 34 (3), 347–356.
• Opoku, R., Abratt, R. & Pitt, L. (2006). Communicating brand personality: Are the websites doing the talking for the top South African Business Schools? Journal of Brand Management. 14, 20-39.
• Campbell, C., Papania, L., Parent, M. & Cyr, D. (2010). An exploratory study into brand alignment in B2B relationships. Industrial Marketing Management. 39 (2), 712-720.
• Opoku, R., Hultman, M. & Salehi-Sangari, E. (2008). Positioning in market space: The evaluation of Swedish universities’ online brand personalities. Journal of Marketing for Higher Education. 18 (1), 124-144.
• Papania, L., Campbell, C., Opoku, R., Styven, M. & Berthon, J. P. (2008). Using brand personality to assess whether biotechnology firms are saying the right things to their network. Journal of Commercial Biotechnology. 14 (3), 247-255.