Analysis of brand personality as a moderator of advertising effectiveness
(A2020-63356)

AUTHORS

Felix Wasser, University of Southern Denmark; Goetz Greve, HSBA Hamburg School of Business Administration; Oliver Schnittka, University of Southern Denmark; Marius Johnen, University of Hamburg; Julian Hofmann, Normandie Business School

KEYWORDS

Media planning; Brand management; Brand personality

ABSTRACT

For differentiating brands from competition, companies have created unique brand personalities that require different communication channels. Interestingly, this often results in predominantly homogeneous media mixes. The dilemma might be rooted in the ignorance of brand-specific criteria. This article proposes a planning framework that includes brand personality into the decision making. It models the personality of a brand as a moderator for the effect of media spends on ad awareness, based on a time series data set with 110 brands from the German market and 11.000 observations. Consistent with Media Richness Theory (MRT), the authors find that brands with quasi-human characteristics can create ad awareness with less effort in low-informative media channels such as Radio and brands with non-human characteristics in high-informative channels like TV. These insights equip practitioners with an applicable framework to improve their marketing goalsetting framework and drive campaign effectiveness.