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The relationship between brand personality and consumer personality has become a researched issue in recent years. It is viewed that marketers start the dialogue with consumers through personality route by building brand personality in line with consumers’ own personality traits. Moreover, in the midst of stiff competition, role of corporate personality, as a component of corporate identity, has been considered instrumental behind the success of the organization. As a result, there might be a possibility that other than his/her own personality traits, a consumer’s brand preference may be influenced by both brand personality and corporate personality of the said brand marketer. So, the predictive roles of individual personality, brand personality and corporate personality on consumer brand preference formation need to be empirically investigated so that the same may be addressed strategically. However, as per knowledge of the researcher, no empirical study has been made to investigate the predictive role of consumer personality, brand personality and corporate personality on brand preference. In this back drop, to the best of our knowledge, this study is the first attempt to fill this research gap by investigating firstly, the direct effects of individual personality of consumer, brand personality and corporate personality on consumer brand preference and secondly the impact of interaction effects of those variables on brand preference in the context of the emerging economies.

This study includes Indian four-wheeler passenger car market as the focal point of the study. As the product category is predominantly linked with symbolic benefits to the consumers, this target segment may be motivated to express their personality through the brands they prefer. As a result it may be an appropriate sector to study the influence of individual, brand and corporate personality behind brand preference. In this study, we have used an anonymous self-administered structured questionnaire. Part A captured respondent’s brand preference. Part B used The Big Five Model personality scale. Part C used the ‘Brand Personality Scale’ proposed by Aaker (1997) as a measure of brand personality. Part D comprised ‘Corporate Personality Scale’ developed by Davies et al. (2001). Part E recorded demographic data, including age, income, educational qualification and occupation. For Part B, C and D, Respondents were asked to rate each of the dimensions, using a five-point Likert scale, ranging from 5=Most descriptive to 1=Least Descriptive. The validity of the theoretical model is tested through Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA). In the first stage, main effects of the proposed model are tested. In the next stage, we have tested interaction effects of constructs on band preference. To test the hypotheses multiple regression method has been used.

The result of main effects shows that individual and brand personality has significant impact on brand preference for the considered brand by the consumers. This implies that at the time of brand preference, consumers give due importance to individual personality and personality of the considered brand of SUV. A strong and clear brand personality indicates a favorable view about the brand. Further, the result shows at the time of buying decision, personalities of both product and corporate brand are influencing their preferences. Here, consumers might be making strong association between corporate and brand personalities. In addition, interaction effects among individual, brand and corporate personality are also significant. One may view from the result that consumers do not encourage compartmentalize thinking at the time of brand choice. In place of considering his/her own personality and brand and corporate personality as a standalone entity, they think in totality and interaction effects have significant influence on their brand preference.

The paper has mentioned limitations: the restriction on selecting industry, company and brand, the restraint of sampling coverage and lack of generalization of the study findings. The implications should be interpreted with care. In this study we have not compared different brands from same industry or brands from different industries; there is a scope to do so. Moreover, this study considers results from one national context and, consequently, cross-national study may be conducted to extend the validity of the findings.

The findings from this study may enlighten brand marketers about the degree of influence of brand personality, corporate personality, and consumer personality on brand preference. This study advocates interaction effects of individual, brand and corporate on consumer brand preference. From this study perspective, we may say, brand personality and corporate personality provide significant opportunity for creation of uniqueness and have the potential to significantly influence brand preference.

This paper makes two contributions to the brand management literature. First, it provides new empirical evidence of the positive main effect of individual and brand personality on brand preference. Second, this paper first investigates interaction effects of individual personality, brand personality and corporate personality on brand preference. This is a very unique contribution of the paper. The results provide new insights for academic and practitioners into the relationship among individual personality, brand personality and corporate personality. This study is the first attempt to fill this research gap by investigating the impact of consumer personality, brand personality and corporate personality on brand preference.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the current state of mission and vision statements on corporate websites of Malaysian and Singaporean corporations based on Aaker's brand personality dimensions and analyze how the dimensions are effectively used to develop a unique corporate identity.

Content analysis is employed to examine similarities and differences for 300 Malaysian and 214 Singaporean consumer corporations based on Aaker's big five brand personality framework.

Generally most companies tend to publish and communicate their mission and vision statements visibly to general stakeholders. First, both Malaysian and Singaporean companies have weak brand personality dimensions which reflect the projection of corporate identity of companies. Second, there is a significant difference in the brand personality dimensions between Malaysian and Singaporean consumer corporations. Finally, evidence showed that most Malaysian and Singaporean companies rather failed to position themselves in the marketplace using brand personality dimensions in their vision and mission statements. This may affect their overall organizational direction in building a unique corporate identity and gaining competitive advantages within the context of a global business environment.

The study acknowledges the increase in communicating the mission and vision statements on the corporate websites of Malaysian and Singaporean corporations. However, there is a need for corporations in Malaysia and Singapore to orchestrate their core competence in order to develop a unique corporate identity in a global business environment.

The study contributes to the corporate identity literature in providing an insight into how corporations communicate the desired brand personality through their websites for the critical inquiry of the dominant coalition and main stakeholders.

This study aims to investigate the relationships among corporate-brand credibility, product-brand personality, and purchase intention, specifically in China's auto industry. A large-scale survey was conducted in four major Chinese Mainland cities: Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Chengdu. A total of 800 questionnaires were distributed for the study. Ultimately, 477 usable cases were collected for a 60 percent response rate. Results reveal that corporate-brand credibility and product-brand personality have direct positive effects on purchase intention. Furthermore, corporate-brand credibility acts as a positive moderator in the relationship between product-brand personality and purchase intention. This chapter offers new theoretical insights into the influential factors affecting consumers' purchase intentions by testing the moderating effect of corporate-brand credibility in the relationship between product-brand personality and purchase intention. It further provides useful suggestions to companies on brand credibility and personality issues.

The interrelationships between corporate personality traits and the success of firms was examined. Corporate personality traits contribute to the characteristic behaviour pattern of a firm.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate Chinese and American financial companies’ distinct brand personality indicators shown through culturally based linguistic features online. The potential correlation between culturally oriented brand personalities and companies’ financial performance is also examined.

This study employs computerized content analyses to examine the cross-cultural differences among 28 American and Chinese financial companies’ online communication based on Aaker’s brand personality framework.

The findings reveal that despite some similarities, there are significant differences between the frequencies and patterns of brand personality indicators on American and Chinese websites, which demonstrate the connection between the companies’ linguistic preferences with their different cultural backgrounds. It also proves that there could be significant relationship between financial companies’ corporate brand (CB) personality expressions and their financial performance, and US financial companies’ revenues are more closely correlated with brand personality dimensions than Chinese companies’.

The necessity for cross-cultural adaptation of CB personality is verified in this study. Chinese international companies may have a big room to improve their online corporate communication. Similarly, foreign companies who intend to enter into Chinese market may think about laying emphasis on their personality indicators of competence in their online corporate communication.

This research is among the first to utilize a corpus-based analytical tool to conduct content analyses of financial companies’ online brand personalities, in addition to empirically validate the correlations between companies’ brand personality indicators and financial performance. The study enriches the literature on online marketing communication, draws attention to the connection between cultural differences and linguistic preferences in CB personality construction and emphasizes the importance of making appropriate cross-cultural adaptation in online corporate communication.

Family businesses feature prominently in economies, including the South African wine industry, using websites to convey their family identity. This research paper aims to explore the family identity elements that family wineries use on their websites, their alignment and how these are communicated online.

Based on Gioia’s methodology, a two-pronged approach was used to analyze 113 wineries’ websites’ text using Atlas. ti from an interpretivist perspective.

South African wineries use corporate identity, corporate personality and corporate expression to illustrate their familiness on their websites. It is portrayed through their family name and heritage, supported by their direction, purpose and aspirations, which emerge from the family identity and personality. These are dynamic and expressed through verbal and visual elements. Wineries described their behaviour, relevant competencies and passion as personality traits. Sustainability was considered an integral part of their brand promise, closely related to their family identity and personality, reflecting their family-oriented philosophy. These findings highlight the integration that exists among these components.

Theoretically, this study proposes a family business brand identity framework emphasising the centrality of familiness to its identity, personality and expression. Using websites to illustrate this familiness is emphasised with the recommendation that family businesses leverage this unique attribute in their identity to communicate their authenticity.

This study contributes to understanding what family wineries communicate on their websites, specifically by examining the elements necessary to create a family business brand based on the interrelationship between family identity, personality and expression with familiness at its core, resulting in a proposed family business brand identity framework.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the current state of mission and vision statements on corporate web sites and to analyze differentiation strategies through the use of online brand personality attributes in order to find if and how the attributes are effectively used to build up a unique corporate identity.

Content analysis is used to investigate similarities and differences between sectors and industries in Switzerland, based on the brand personality scale of Aaker. Also, the paper focuses on the impact of the communication of brand personality elements, in terms of positioning and differentiation, using correspondence analysis.

The claim that companies do present brand personality by frequently communicating respective attributes through mission and vision statements published on their web site are supported. However, top management does not seem to be geared towards industry norms when phrasing the statements, as a considerable similarity in statement content is found across industries. The results show that companies position themselves using their competitors as a frame of reference.

The results may lack generalizability to small and medium‐sized businesses and other industries.

As most companies in the study position themselves using the same attributes and specifically emphasize “competence,” the results include practical implications for the need to develop uniqueness and differentiation by other means.

This paper discovers a gap between the claim that organizations seek uniqueness in their personality attributes and the reality of their involvement in mutual coorientation when defining their identity, forcing them to adapt to each other.

Purpose statements persuade stakeholders of companies' reasons for being. The goal of this study was to analyze how purpose-driven companies craft their purpose, mission and vision statements and whether and how purpose statements differ from mission and vision statements.

This quantitative content analysis explored the brand personality traits, mission statement components and corporate ethos appeals that purpose-driven companies included in their purpose, mission and vision statements.

Results provide implications for corporate leaders and communicators who write these statements as well as theoretical implications related to brand personality, rhetorical theory and corporate ethos.

This research provides practical implications for corporate leaders and communication professionals about how to craft these statements, what components they might include and the potential benefits and downfalls of not clearly differentiating among purpose, mission and vision statements.

While several studies have compared differences between mission and vision statements, there is a lack of academic literature on how companies craft purpose statements. This study added to this body of knowledge on corporate communication.

It will be recalled that the last monograph treated the significance of the collective agreement in society. If solely a function in society, (though having a legal basis), were to be attributed to the collective agreement, this would mean that no rights or obligations whatsoever would be created between the parties to it. This is not so in practice. It is of course a fact that no legally enforceable rights and obligations normally accrue, and as already indicated, those are moral ones and are only enforceable in honour, i.e. a gentleman's agreement. Nevertheless, this does not necessarily mean that the collective agreement has no juridical significance. Even agreements which are binding in honour only, as for example the kind of agreement found in Balfour v. Balfour, have a known juridical nature. Furthermore, though the collective agreement is only binding in honour, its incorporation into the individual contract of employment makes its terms legally enforceable even though recourse to the courts is seldom had. As a source of rights and obligations of considerable importance the collective agreement must therefore have some juridical significance and cannot remain entirely in the realms of society.

The role of Wally Olins (1930-2014) vis-à-vis corporate identity scholarship is appraised. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

A review of Wally Olins published output on corporate identity. Specific focus is accorded to his two seminal publications (books): The Corporate Personality: An Inquiry into the Nature of Corporate Identity (1978) and Corporate Identity: Making Business Strategy Visible through Design (1989).

Olins’ contribution to corporate identity scholarship is fivefold, namely: inspired and greatly influenced the first generation of corporate communications and corporate marketing academics; provided binary definitions of corporate identity; noted the importance of the Corporate Personality vis-à-vis the corporate identity; introduced the heroic and technocratic identity notions; and identified three, core, corporate identity structures (monolithic identity, endorsed identity and branded identity). In terms of his entire opus three distinct eras can be discerned, namely: 1978-1979: the identity exposition era; 1985-1999: the identity reiteration era; and 2000-2014 brand adherent era.

Olins was also part of the English corporate marketing revolution where the importance of organisations (other than products and services) were recognised. His reflections and those of others inspired Balmer (1998) to formally introduced the corporate marketing perspective where the focus of marketing focuses on organisations, stakeholders, societal concerns and the temporal dimension.

This is the first assessment of Olins’ influence on corporate identity scholarship. It critically appraises the nature of his contribution in his three writing periods vis-a-vis corporate identity scholarship and identifies five, significant, contributions he has made to the corporate identity canon.