How developing a clear and distinct Brand Personality can help companies to overcome the challenge of differentiation in the Smartphone industry

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.

Techno Yoda insight: What should Sony do after acquisition of Sony Ericsson

It took too long to write the second part of "Why Sony should acquire Sony Ericsson" and today they just did it!
Now what is next and what should they do?
1- First and foremost, they should get rid of Sony Ericsson brand ASAP! Why? it is obvious ! No one is going to buy a discontinued brand! I think they have done this and that is why they just remodelled Xperia arc to Xperia arc S instead of  introducing Nozomi or any other dual core and more powerful phone for now. So we can wait for the Nozomi under Sony brand.
2- Sony needs more market share. During the years SE's market share has vanished. So Sony needs to think big. You might be too young to remember that long time ago HTC was flirting with Sony Ericsson to be bought by them! But now things are changed and HTC has overtaken SE . However, Sony should think about it seriously. Having HTC capacity in the side will bring more market share for them immediately. But it needs too much money as well. Will you lend some money to them?
3- Integrating, Integrating and MORE INTEGRATING. Sony needs to integrate its highly fragmented but rich territories. I think they are on the right path.They just need to make it more quickly. If they can bring Sony's entertainment capabilities such as music, movie, game, ebook, as a sub-ecosystem on the Android almighty platform,  It will equip them with a capable weapon to fight against Apple (iOS) and Microsoft (Windows Phone)  and also it may help them to differentiate themselves from other Android manufacturers as well.
If Sony could complete at least 2 tasks from the above, you should expect a bigger than Apple outcome!