The Personality of Luxury Brands

This paper argues for and develops a new luxury brand personality measure. Drawing on recent criticisms of the applicability of Aaker’s (1997) brand personality scale, an attempt is made to develop a new measure that can better capture the particularities of luxury brands. The measure is based on the actual language commonly used by consumers to describe luxury brands across different sectors. Extensive online text mining and in-depth interviews were used to develop an initial pool of luxury brand descriptors. After a screening of personality traits from other image descriptors, lexical analysis based on the semantic differences of personality traits resulted in a new typology of luxury brand personality traits. The reported results represent the initial stage of a bigger development project that will assess the scale in further empirical tests.