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March 27, 2006
Does Personality Matter?
This week's Interbrand newsletter leads off with an interesting article on brand personality. In brief, the article posits that "collectivist" cultures (e.g., Asian cultures) don't relate to brand personality the way that "individualist" cultures do. Using the hello kitty as an example of a widespread brand identity without personality (apparently the creators intentionally left kitty without a story, preferring to let viewers read in whatever seemed resonant), the authors suggest that perhaps this whole personality thing is neither universal nor global.
Question is, does that matter? Well, if you're in the business of building brands--or of paying someone else to do it--it certainly should.
It has been a longstanding given in the world of brand building that brand personality (or persona) is one of the key foundations a good brand position seeks to articulate. So any gesture that undermines this central tenant would appear an urgent topic to study further, wouldn't it?
Unfortunately, all that's at stake is the jousting of one set of unsuitable generalizations (collectivist and individualist cultures) with another (ubiquity of brand personality). As as result, what should be a rallying cry for further research is just a further illustration of the industry's tendency to substitute generality and imprecise thought for insight and meaning.
To be quite clear, I believe that these are all useful concepts. (And to be fair to BrandChannel.com, their lead, which reads "Do Westerners place more value on the personality traits of a brand than Asian cultures?" isn't as black and white as my comments might suggest.) But I am sincerely troubled by the industry's acceptance of its tendency to generalize, particularly when those generalities obfuscate important distinctions.
In his brilliant Citizen and Subject, Mahmood Mamdani warns against “history by analogy,” that is, by assuming, based on the similarity of different historical phenomena, that one may understands the significance of those events within a natural framework (i.e., intuitively).
To provide one example (my own), the Dutch colonized Manhattan and the Hudson River Valley and Cape Town at approximately the same time (1609 and 1652, respectively). Clearly, to generalize on the basis of this similarity about patterns of Dutch colonization from the perspective of indigenous southern Africans and northern Americans (South Africa and North America were not yet proper nouns) would be a mistake.
Though terms like brand personality, collectivist and individualist culture have a sanctioned utility as shorthand for more complex, nuanced thought it’s a crying shame when the shorthand becomes the entire alphabet of available expression.
Posted by davidkippen at March 27, 2006 02:23 PM