Developing Brand Personality Through Colour Construct – A ...

looked beyond the aesthetic value of colour and investigated its functional value. This
functional value originates from specific meanings that colours convey in different contexts
and has implications for psychological functioning; their studies demonstrate that the mere
perception of the colour evokes affect, cognition, and behavior congruent to the meaning
(Elliot et al, 2007). Cool colours such as green, blue, and white clustered together are
associated with gentle, peaceful, and calming meanings; whereas, warm colors such as
yellow, gold, orange, red, and purple clustered together and are associated with vibrant, hot,
active, and sharp meanings (Madden et al, 2000). Recent research on brand personality
defines the construct as “the set of human characteristics associated with a brand” and
documents a stable set of personality dimensions that are thought to underlie the construct
(Aaker, 1997)
• sincerity, typified by traits such as wholesome, down-to-earth, and honest;
• excitement, typified by traits such as daring, imaginative, and exciting;
• competence, typified by traits such as intelligent, secure, and confident;
• sophistication, typified by traits such as glamorous, smooth, and charming; and
• ruggedness, typified traits such as strong, masculine, and western.
Brand personality scale (BPS) measures, as proposed by Aaker (1997), the extent to which a
given brand possesses any of these personality traits. Brand personality influences
consumers’ perceptual processing of product information. Brand personality is a nonphysical
piece of product knowledge that shapes perceptions about that product and deals with the
importance of relations in social activities and gives the brand higher positions in the mind of
consumers and makes the brand as their friends and belongings (Rajagopal, 2006); and it is
all the attitudes, perspectives, feelings and views customers have about a brand. Brand
associations are important to marketers and to consumers. Marketers use brand associations
to differentiate, position, and extend brands, to create positive attitudes and feelings toward
brands, and to suggest attributes or benefits of purchasing or using a specific brand.
Consumers use brand associations to help process, organize, and retrieve information in
memory and to aid them in making purchase decisions. Another advantage of the personality
association is that it establishes direct relationship with the customers (Taft, 1997). Therefore,
we propose the following hypothesis:
H1: Brand colour blue is associated with the personality trait, competence (intelligence,
secure, & confident);
H2: Brand colour purple is associated with personality trait, sophistication (glamorous,
smooth, & charming);
H3: Brand colour orange is associated with personality trait, excitement (daring,
imaginative, & exciting);
H4: Brand colour red is associated with personality trait, sincerity (wholesome, down-toearth,
& honest).
3. Research Methodology
Our sample frame includes 700 Pakistani youth, with an age bracket of 18-26, who
constitutes the highest usage of cellular services in Pakistan (Pakistan Telecom Authority,
2011), the sampling method used is stratified random sampling. We analysed brand colours’
impact on developing brand personalities of five telecom companies operating in Pakistan,
The brands include: Mobilink, Telenor, Ufone, Warid, and Zong. Mobilink’s brand colour is
purple, Telenor’s brand colour is blue, Ufone’s brand colour is orange, Warid’s brand colour
is red, whereas, Zong does not have any one predominant brand colour, instead it is a
combination of yellow, red, and blue. We used a questionnaire survey, wherein, the questions