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The purpose of this paper is to test whether employee characteristics (age, gender, role and experience) influence the effects of employer brand image, for warmth and competence, on employee satisfaction and engagement.

Members of the public were surveyed as to their satisfaction and engagement with their employer and their view of their employer brand image. Half were asked to evaluate their employer’s “warmth” and half its “competence”. The influence of employee characteristics was tested on a “base model” linking employer image to satisfaction and engagement using a mediated moderation model.

The base model proved valid; satisfaction partially mediates the influence of employer brand image on engagement. Age, experience gender, and whether the role involved customer contact moderate both the influence of the employer brand image and of satisfaction on engagement.

Engagement varies with employee characteristics, and both segmenting employees and promoting the employer brand image differentially to specific groups are ways to counter this effect.

The contexts in which employer brand image can influence employees in general and specific groups of employees in particular are not well understood. This is the first empirical study of the influence of employer brand image on employee engagement and one of few that considers the application of employee segmentation.

This paper aims to critique human personality as a theory underpinning brand personality and to propose instead a theory from human perception, and by doing so, to identify universally relevant dimensions.

A review of published measures of brand personality, a re-analysis of two existing data bases and the analysis of one new database are used to argue and test for the dimensions derived from perception theory.

Existing work on brand personality suggests 16 separate dimensions for the construct, but some appear common to most measures. When non-orthogonal rotation is used to re-analyse existing trait data on brand personality, three dimensions derived from signalling and associated theory can emerge: sincerity (e.g. warm, friendly and agreeable), competence (e.g. competent, effective and efficient) and status (e.g. prestigious, elegant and sophisticated). The first two are common to most measures, status is not.

Three dimensions derived from signalling and associated theory are proposed as generic, relevant to all contexts and cultures. They can be supplemented by context specific dimensions.

Measures of these three dimensions should be included in all measures of brand personality.

Prior work on brand personality has focussed on identifying apparently new dimensions for the construct. While most work is not theoretically based, some have argued for the relevance of human personality. That model is challenged, and an alternative approach to both theory and analysis is proposed and successfully tested.