On congruence between human and brand personalities in Chinese culture context

Abstract

Brand personality is believed as an important concept in marketing for the reason that , consumers tend to grow an emotional bonding with the brands that have similar personality traits with their own and thus ,there is a congruence between human and brands personalities. This congruence however , to certain degree is believed to be influenced by another vital concept in consumer behavior : Culture. This paper is conducted in China ,and explores how culture affects the congruence pattern between human and brands personalities by comparing the congruence patterns in China and in another culture. To help defining and compare culture differences , Hofstede’s five culture dimensions were applied in this paper. And reference for comparison is findings from a former research conducted in a western culture, Norway. this paper duplicated the methodology from the Norwegian study, so as to discover the congruence pattern in Chinese culture context: students from an university in a Chinese city were asked to fill a 2-staged survey, which aims at defining the chosen brands’ personality separately and each respondents’ personality and their preference towards these brands ; SPSS software was used to analysis the correlation between certain type of human personality and their similar brand personality. After the congruence pattern in China was discovered , the results in researches from Norway and China were compared so as to see the similarities and differences ; differences in culture dimensions from these two countries were applied to explain the difference of congruence patterns.