Smart phone industry and the challenge of
differentiation
Smart phone industry sub-sector is one of the
most competitive markets and has one of the fastest growing rates in the global
IT sector. Now a day, the market has shifted from
devices and hardware towards ecosystems, a combination of hardware, software
and also online services. The major ecosystems according to the latest research by Gartner are: Android, powered by Google with 52.5% market
share, Symbian by Nokia (Transferred to Accenture from April 2011) with 16.9% market
share, iOS by Apple with 15% market share and Windows Phone by Microsoft by 1.5%
market share. As Nokia has stated that is phasing
out Symbian and has chosen Windows phone as its main platform for its smart
phones, the main rivalry is
taking place between three main ecosystems in the smart phone industry, Android, iOS and
Windows Phone. Apart from iOs which has just one vendor, Apple, two other major
ecosystems, Android and Windows phone have been used by several manufacturers
across the world such as Nokia, Samsung, HTC, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, and LG.
The main challenge for these manufacturers is to convince consumers that their
product is more sophisticated and can provide more benefits than others. However, many analysts believe that it is getting harder for consumers to distinguish a smart phone brand
from another within a given ecosystem due to the similarity in the operating
system, software, available applications and the relevant benefits. So finding
another source of differentiation apart from hardware design and product outline
or any other functional factors seems important and even vital within the smart
phone industry.
Brand Personality
The brand personality is a construct which is related to
the emotional content of a brand and concentrates on what the brand says about
the consumers and how they feel being associated with it. Through brand personality consumers
will be able to recognise the value its stands for. It also acts as purchase
motivator since consumers prefer brands whose values reflects those they
respect. It can help provide needed
differentiation by making the brand interesting and memorable, stimulating
consideration of constructs such as energy and youthfulness, and enforcing
brand-consumer relationship.
Dr Jennifer Aaker defined brand personality as: “the
set of human characteristics associated with a brand”.
She proposed the Brand Personality Scale consisted of five dimensions and 42 items:
Sincerity (down to earth, honest,
wholesome, and cheerful)
• Excitement
(daring, spiritual, imaginative, and up to date)
• Competence
(reliable, intelligent, and successful)
• Sophistication
(upper class and charming)
• Ruggedness
(outdoorsy and though)
Although Aaker's brand personality scale has been used by many scholars and has been the most popular scale to measure brand personality so far, it failed to fulfil some of the most important applications. First and foremost, several cross-cultural researches, including two researches by Aaker herself, proved that some of the dimensions cannot by generalised in different cultures. Also as Azoulay
and Kapferer (2003) argued, Aaker’s brand personality scale may not
measure really brand personality, but other unrelated concepts. They suggested
that lack of strict definition of brand personality has caused confusion among
researchers and proposed their own definition as “brand personality is the set
of human personality traits that are both applicable to and relevant for
brands”
Geuens, Weijters, and De Wulf (2009) by considering critisims against Aaker’s
brand personality scale developed a new scale with compatibility with
the Big Five human personality dimensions. By focusing on the new definition of
brand personality which was suggested by Azoulay and Kapferer (2003) they tried to exclude all
none-personality items such as age and gender from the new dimensions and suggested new Brand Personality Scale consisted of five dimensions and 12 items:
- Responsibility
(down-to-earth, stable, responsible)
- Activity (active,
dynamic, innovative)
- Aggressiveness
(aggressive, bold)
- Simplicity
(ordinary, simple)
- Emotionality
(romantic, sentimental)
They examined their new scale in the US and 10 European countries and argued that: “the scale can be used for studies on an aggregate level
across multiple brands of different product categories, for studies across
different competitors within a specific product category, for studies on an individual brand
level, and for cross-cultural studies”
However, this new brand personality scale has not been used that much so far.
How to develop brand personality?
Brand’s personality can be created and shaped
by any direct and indirect brand contact that the consumer experiences with the
brand. Both
product-related factors such as product category, packaging, price, and the
physical attributes and also other factors which are not related to the product
such as consumer’s past experience, user imagery, symbols, marketing
communication, word of mouth, CEO image, celebrity endorsers, and culture can
form brand personality.
This is in align with branding process in the relationship marketing concept
which is highlighting the role of different relations on forming brand image on
the mind of consumers including C2C relation such as word of mouth. Susan
Fournier reframed brand personality in relationship terms. She views brand
personality not as a set of interpersonal attributes but as the relationship
role enacted by the brand in its partnership with the consumer. She emphasis if
we assume a brand as a person so we can assume marketing mix as the person’s
behaviour as a result she argued that every day execution of marketing mix
decision constitute a set of behaviours enacted on the part of the brand. She
suggested a typology of 15 relationship types characterising consumers’
engagement with brands.
Although any aspect of marketing may affect brand personality,
advertising may be especially influential because of the inferences consumers
make about the underlying user or usage situation depicted. Advertisers may
imbue a brand with personality traits through anthropomorphization and product
animation techniques, personification through the use of brand characters, the
creation of user imagery and so on. More generally
advertising may affect brand personality by the manner in which it depicts the
brand – for example the actors, the tone or style of the creative strategy and
the emotions or feelings evoked. Once brand develop a personality it can be
difficult for consumers to accept information that they see as inconsistent
with that personality. Furthermore, Although user imagery, especially in
advertising, is a prime source of brand personality, user imagery and brand
personality may not always be in agreement. In product categories were
performance-related attributes are more central in consumer decisions, brand
personality and user imagery maybe much less related .
New way of differentiation
Based on the above discussions, it can be said that brand
personality as an important emotional content of a brand can have an important
role to create differentiation for smart phone manufacturers within a given
ecosystem. So a research has been developed to provide empirical evidence regarding the extent to which
smart phone brands have established clear and distinct brand personalities in
the mind of consumers in United Kingdom, which is one of the most sophisticated smartphone markets in the world, and measure the brand personalities of
the market leaders by using the new brand personality scale proposed by Geuens,
Weijters, and De Wulf (2009). Findings of the research will be posted in this weblog.
