Brand personality and lifestyle positioning

According to King (1970) “What is in a brand” people opt their brands as they choose their friends irrespective of their skills and physical features. Which might be interpreted as, the functional characteristics of the branded product are not important for consumers’ brand preferences. In my opinion, this argument misses the fact that symbolic brands (associated primarily with intangible benefits) are more likely to be used as means of self-expression than functional ones (associated primarily with physical characteristics, performance), which is supported by the research of Aaker (1997) Richins (1994) and Katz (1960). And switching to symbolic positioning, because of the above mentioned argument, can pose to a lot of threats as stated in the article “Competing for consumer identity: Limits to self-expression and the perils of lifestyle branding”. In other words, if managers choose to position their brand as a symbolic (lifestyle positioning), thinking that they will more easily catch the consumer and brand personality is the only thing that matters to him, they can even face a bigger threat by across-category competition by different self-expressive brands as well as non-brand self-expressive means and behavioral acts.  That’s why, because self-expression can be saturated by many alternatives, even non-branded means and is finite.

In conclusion, the above mentioned argument falsely assumes that consumer’s choice for brands is only/primarily determined by the personality of the brand. Moreover, managers should carefully consider the threats and not to switch functional branding to lifestyle branding, just because its popularity grows or mislead by the power of brand personality.

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