New Measure of Brand Personality (NMBP)

Abstract

The New Measure of Brand Personality (NMBP) is a psychometrically validated, parsimonious instrument designed to quantify consumers’ perceptions of brand personality traits across diverse product categories and cultural contexts. Developed by Maggie Geuens, Bert Weijters, and Kristof De Wulf in 2009, the scale was created to resolve fundamental theoretical, methodological, and psychometric limitations inherent in Jennifer Aaker’s seminal Brand Personality Scale (BPS; Aaker, 1997). Specifically, Aaker’s BPS was criticized for conflating genuine human personality traits with utilitarian product attributes, demographic markers, and functional benefits (e.g., “feminine,” “masculine,” “small-town,” “western”), while failing to establish factor stability across cultural boundaries and brand levels.

The NMBP overcomes these vulnerabilities by adhering strictly to personality psychological definitions derived from the Five-Factor Model (FFM) and applying rigorous confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) across multi-country datasets. Comprising 12 items structured into five distinct, non-orthogonal yet discriminable dimensions—Responsibility, Activity, Aggressiveness, Simplicity, and Emotionality—the instrument captures brand personality using a 7-point Likert response format ranging from 1 (“Not at all characteristic”) to 7 (“Very characteristic”). Across empirical cross-national trials in Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United States, spanning 193 brands and multiple consumer demographics, the NMBP has demonstrated robust internal consistency (composite reliabilities typically exceeding .75 to .88), discriminant validity, and structural invariance across respondents and brand categories. This article provides a comprehensive academic review of the NMBP, delineating its historical context, theoretical foundations, psychometric architecture, validity evidence, and practical administration procedures.

Keywords

New Measure of Brand Personality, NMBP, brand personality, psychometrics, consumer psychology, confirmatory factor analysis, Big Five personality traits, cross-cultural marketing, scale validation, structural equation modeling, brand identity, perceptual mapping, consumer-brand relationships.

Authors

The New Measure of Brand Personality was conceived, developed, and validated through an academic and empirical research collaboration led by prominent European marketing scientists and psychometricians:

• Maggie Geuens, Ph.D.: Professor of Marketing and Consumer Behavior at the Department of Marketing, Innovation and Organisation, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Ghent University, and Professor of Marketing at Vlerick Business School, Belgium. Her research focuses on consumer behavior, brand perception, advertising effectiveness, and measurement theory.
• Bert Weijters, Ph.D.: Professor of Data Analytics and Research Methods in the Department of Work, Organisation and Society at Ghent University, Belgium. Renowned for his methodological expertise in survey design, response styles, acquiescence bias, structural equation modeling, and psychometrics in business and psychological sciences.
• Kristof De Wulf, Ph.D.: Former Professor of Marketing at Ghent University and co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Human8 (formerly InSites Consulting), an international consumer insight agency. His scholarly work focuses on brand strategy, consumer communities, and relational marketing.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the New Measure of Brand Personality (NMBP) is to furnish marketing researchers, behavioral scientists, and brand strategists with a psychometrically rigorous, theoretically pure, and cross-culturally replicable instrument to measure consumers’ perceptions of brand personality. Historically, brand personality has been conceptualized as the set of human personality traits associated with a given brand. While Jennifer Aaker’s (1997) 42-item Brand Personality Scale (BPS) was widely adopted, empirical scrutiny uncovered severe structural and conceptual vulnerabilities that compromised its utility for rigorous scientific inquiry.

Overcoming Conceptual Contamination

A fundamental limitation of legacy brand personality scales was the inclusion of non-personality adjectives. Aaker’s scale merged personality descriptors (e.g., “cheerful,” “honest”) with demographic categories (e.g., “young,” “feminine”), physical attributes, geographic stereotypes (e.g., “western”), and functional quality signals (e.g., “leader,” “good value”). In personality psychology, personality refers specifically to characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving, rooted in stable behavioral dispositions. Describing a brand as “western” or “upper-class” reflects market segmentation or socioeconomic categorization rather than a dispositional personality trait. The NMBP was constructed by systematically filtering out product-category-specific associations, functional performance attributes, and demographic classifications, retaining exclusively those adjectives that function as legitimate personality descriptors applicable to human beings and anthropomorphized commercial entities alike.

Resolution of Methodological and Factorial Deficits

From a psychometric standpoint, earlier instruments were predominantly developed using exploratory factor analysis (EFA) on data aggregated across individuals and product classes. This approach conflated three distinct sources of variance: between-brand variance, between-respondent variance, and within-respondent variance. Consequently, when researchers attempted to validate Aaker’s five dimensions (Sincerity, Excitement, Competence, Sophistication, Ruggedness) at the individual brand level or within specific consumer segments, the factor structure routinely collapsed, demonstrating poor goodness-of-fit, high inter-factor correlations, and weak discriminant validity. Furthermore, cross-cultural applications revealed that Aaker’s dimensions were heavily overfitted to the United States cultural context, requiring entirely new factor structures when applied in East Asia, South America, or Europe. The NMBP was engineered specifically to demonstrate multi-group factorial invariance across different brands, product categories, and national cultures using rigorous structural equation modeling (SEM).

Practical and Strategic Applications

The NMBP serves critical diagnostic and strategic functions across commercial, academic, and clinical-adjacent marketing research domains:

• Brand Audit and Positioning: Facilitates granular perceptual mapping to evaluate whether a brand’s strategic identity aligns with actual consumer brand perception.
• Competitive Benchmarking: Enables standardized comparison among market competitors across five clean, orthogonal-leaning dimensions without confounding results with price, physical packaging, or category effects.
• Cross-Cultural Brand Governance: Allows multinational corporations to measure brand equity and personality perceptions consistently across linguistic and geographic borders without requiring ad-hoc dimensional reinvention.
• Consumer-Brand Relationship Research: Empowers academic researchers to investigate psychological phenomena such as self-congruity theory, brand attachment, brand love, brand forgiveness, and anthropomorphic consumer behavior with high construct validity.

Psychological Construct

The NMBP operationalizes brand personality through a five-dimensional latent model derived from human trait psychology and consumer anthropomorphism. Each dimension reflects a distinct, psychologically grounded facet of how individuals project dispositional behavioral traits onto non-human corporate or product entities.

1. Responsibility (RES)

The Responsibility dimension reflects a brand’s perceived reliability, trustworthiness, and ethical steadiness. Brands scoring high on this dimension are viewed as steady corporate citizens that honor commitments, act prudently, and avoid erratic or volatile behaviors. The adjective down-to-earth implies humility, authenticity, and an absence of pretense; stable connotes temporal permanence, financial and structural endurance, and predictable performance; responsible denotes moral accountability, duty of care toward stakeholders, and societal stewardship. Within the Big Five taxonomy, Responsibility corresponds closely to aspects of Conscientiousness (order, dutifulness) and Agreeableness (trust, altruism).

2. Activity (ACT)

Activity taps into the perceived metabolic rate, dynamism, and progressive thrust of the brand. Highly active brands project vibrancy, enthusiasm, and continuous evolution. The marker active highlights physical or psychological vitality; dynamic signals fluidity, adaptability, and high energy; innovative captures creative problem-solving and pioneering novelty. This construct provides a direct analog to human Extraversion (specifically the sensation-seeking, high-energy facets) and the Openness to Experience domain (intellectual curiosity, modernism).

3. Aggressiveness (AGG)

Aggressiveness operationalizes an assertive, dominant, and unapologetic market stance. While consumer psychologists historically avoided negative or provocative trait markers, Geuens et al. (2009) demonstrated that consumers readily assign confrontational traits to disruptive, boundary-pushing brands. The adjective aggressive reflects an uncompromising, competitive, and forceful demeanor; bold reflects fearlessness, risk tolerance, and daring actions. Aggressiveness is distinct from mere activity, capturing an antagonistic or boundary-violating quality akin to low Agreeableness (hostility, competitiveness) and high Agency/Dominance.

4. Simplicity (SIM)

Simplicity measures the degree to which a brand is perceived as unpretentious, unadorned, and mainstream. Brands indexing high on Simplicity are seen as everyday options that eschew luxury, complex technological barriers, or elitist status signaling. The marker ordinary signifies accessibility to the common person and universality of appeal; simple denotes clarity, minimalism, and ease of cognitive processing. This dimension is crucial in consumer research because modern markets frequently differentiate between sophisticated/niche offerings and functional, egalitarian staples.

5. Emotionality (EMO)

Emotionality evaluates a brand’s capacity to elicit, project, and embody delicate affective states. While other dimensions capture pragmatic or behavioral attributes, Emotionality focuses on human heart-centered experiences. The item romantic invokes intimacy, idealized passion, elegance, and aesthetic enchantment; sentimental evokes nostalgia, cherished memories, emotional tenderness, and interpersonal attachment. This dimension diverges markedly from utilitarian consumer evaluations, offering a dedicated metric for luxury, artistic, and emotionally expressive branding strategies.

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical architecture of the NMBP is grounded in the intersection of cognitive psychology, anthropomorphism, evolutionary psychology, and psychometric trait theory.

Anthropomorphism and Animism in Consumer Perception

The foundation of brand personality research rests on anthropomorphism—the universal cognitive tendency of human beings to attribute human characteristics, mental states, motivations, and behavioral dispositions to non-human agents. Historically formulated through animism theory (Gilmore, 1919), consumers perceive commercial brands not merely as physical products or legal entities, but as active relational partners capable of expressing intentions and values (Fournier, 1998). When consumers process brand communications, packaging, corporate behavior, and user communities, they synthesize these stimuli through social cognition mechanisms originally evolved for interpersonal appraisal, forming stable mental models of the brand as a “person.”

The Five-Factor Model (FFM) and the Lexical Hypothesis

The NMBP is deeply rooted in the psychometric traditions of the Five-Factor Model developed by Paul Costa, Robert McCrae, and Lewis Goldberg. Grounded in the lexical hypothesis—the premise that the most salient individual differences in human transactions eventually become encoded into single descriptive words within natural language—the authors systematically reviewed extensive lexical pools of human personality descriptors. Unlike prior marketing scales that imported functional descriptors wholesale, Geuens et al. enforced strict adherence to human trait terminology, ensuring that every retained item represented a genuine, dispositional human personality characteristic.

Self-Congruity Theory

The strategic and theoretical utility of brand personality scales is explained largely by Self-Congruity Theory (Sirgy, 1982). Sirgy posited that consumer behavior is guided in significant part by the psychological matching between a consumer’s self-concept (actual self, ideal self, or social self) and the user-image or personality projected by a product or brand. Consumers prefer, form attachments to, and remain loyal to brands whose perceived personalities align with or enhance their own self-identities. An accurate, valid measurement tool like the NMBP is vital for assessing this congruence. If a measurement tool is contaminated with category-specific or functional variables, self-congruity calculations become psychometrically confounded.

Separation of Measurement Variance Levels

A pivotal theoretical contribution of the NMBP is its methodological separation of between-brand, between-respondent, and within-respondent variance. Human personality instruments (such as the NEO-PI-R) measure variance solely between individuals across a static set of self-referential questions. In contrast, brand personality evaluations encompass a complex multi-level data matrix where respondents evaluate multiple brands across multiple categories. Geuens et al. recognized that pooling data without isolating the level of analysis generates artifactual factor structures. The theoretical framework of the NMBP was thus engineered using within-brand and between-brand modeling techniques, ensuring that the five dimensions hold structural integrity whether analyzed across individual consumers evaluating one brand or across broad competitive sets.

Validity

The validity of the NMBP has been substantiated through rigorous multi-sample, multi-method psychometric testing across diverse demographic groups, consumer markets, and product categories.

Construct and Structural Validity

Construct validity was established through extensive Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) across independent samples. Geuens et al. (2009) tested the 12-item, 5-factor model against competing structural configurations (e.g., single-factor, three-factor, and Aaker’s five-factor models). The five-factor NMBP demonstrated superior fit indices across all validation datasets:

• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR) consistently ≤ .05;
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) values ranging between .038 and .058;
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI) and Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) routinely exceeding .95, satisfying the stringent criteria established by Hu and Bentler (1999).

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity—a critical failing of legacy scales—was comprehensively established using the Fornell-Larcker criterion and pairwise latent factor correlations. Fornell and Larcker (1981) specify that the Average Variance Extracted (AVE) of each latent factor must exceed the squared correlation between that factor and any other latent construct in the measurement model. Across all empirical tests conducted by Geuens et al. (2009), the AVE for Responsibility, Activity, Aggressiveness, Simplicity, and Emotionality exceeded .50 (typically ranging from .54 to .76), and in every instance, the AVE exceeded the shared variance between paired dimensions. Inter-factor correlations were low to moderate (typically |r| < .45), demonstrating that the five dimensions capture distinct psychometric space.

Cross-Cultural and Cross-Category Invariance

To demonstrate generalizability, the scale was evaluated across varied linguistic, cultural, and product domains:

• Multi-Country Invariance: Evaluated across consumer panels in Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United States, multi-group confirmatory factor analysis (MGCFA) confirmed metric invariance (equal factor loadings) and scalar invariance (equal item intercepts), allowing researchers to compare latent means directly across nations.
• Category Invariance: Validated across fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), durables, luxury goods, digital services, and non-profit organizations, the 12 items maintained their psychometric properties without category-specific distortion.

Nomological and Criterion-Related Predictive Validity

Criterion validity was established by correlating NMBP dimensions with recognized consumer outcome variables, including brand attitude, brand trust, affective commitment, and purchase intention. Empirical findings demonstrate that:

• Responsibility is the strongest positive predictor of brand trust and long-term brand equity (β ranging from .35 to .52, p < .001).
• Activity strongly drives brand excitement, perceived innovativeness, and brand buzz.
• Aggressiveness exhibits negative or non-significant correlations with brand trust in traditional product categories, but positive correlations with brand preference among young, counter-cultural demographics.
• Emotionality selectively predicts affective brand attachment, willingness to pay a price premium, and brand advocacy in hedonic and luxury sectors.

Reliability

The NMBP demonstrates exemplary internal consistency reliability and measurement stability across diverse testing conditions.

Internal Consistency Metrics

In the seminal psychometric investigation by Geuens et al. (2009), involving both consumer panels and student samples across multiple nations, the scale dimensions displayed robust Cronbach’s alpha (α) and Composite Reliability (CR / McDonald’s ω) coefficients, comfortably exceeding the established .70 benchmark for psychological instruments:

• Responsibility (3 items): Cronbach’s α = .83 to .89; Composite Reliability = .85
• Activity (3 items): Cronbach’s α = .81 to .87; Composite Reliability = .84
• Aggressiveness (2 items): Cronbach’s α = .78 to .86; Composite Reliability = .82
• Simplicity (2 items): Cronbach’s α = .72 to .80; Composite Reliability = .76
• Emotionality (2 items): Cronbach’s α = .77 to .84; Composite Reliability = .81

Two-Item Subscale Reliability Considerations

While classical test theory often cautions against two-item subscales due to vulnerability to item-specific variance, the two-item factors in the NMBP (Aggressiveness, Simplicity, Emotionality) exhibit strong inter-item correlations (routinely r > .60, p < .001) and high standardized factor loadings (> .75). Extensive simulations and multi-group CFA tests confirmed that these two-item factors do not suffer from identification problems or Heywood cases (negative error variances) when modeled within the complete structural framework.

Test-Retest Stability

Test-retest stability was evaluated across a four-week interval using longitudinal consumer panels. Intra-class correlation coefficients (ICC) across the five dimensions ranged from .76 to .88, confirming that the NMBP measures stable, enduring perceptual constructs rather than transient, state-dependent moods or context-driven fluctuations.

Factor Analysis

The derivation of the NMBP represents a textbook application of modern psychometric scale purification, utilizing sequential exploratory and confirmatory modeling techniques.

Item Generation and Initial Purification

The development protocol began with an initial pool of over 400 personality adjectives extracted from the Big Five personality inventories, consumer research literature, and dictionaries. A series of purification filters was systematically applied:

1. Non-Personality Elimination: Removal of demographic labels, physical functional descriptors, and product-specific jargon by independent panels of psychometricians and consumer psychologists.
2. Comprehensibility and Familiarity Screening: Adjectives with low consumer familiarity or high ambiguity were culled.
3. Broad Category Applicability: Retention of only those traits capable of meaningfully describing brands across diverse commercial sectors (automotive, financial, food and beverage, apparel, telecommunications).

This process yielded a refined pool of 44 candidate adjectives, which was subjected to empirical testing across large consumer samples evaluating extensive brand sets.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and Model Fit

Unlike prior instruments that relied entirely on exploratory techniques, the final 12-item NMBP structure was isolated and validated via Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) using maximum likelihood estimation. The 12-item, 5-factor model exhibited excellent global fit across multiple independent samples:

Standardized Factor Loadings

All 12 items display strong, statistically significant factor loadings (λ > .70, p < .001) on their assigned latent constructs, with negligible cross-loadings:

• Responsibility: Down-to-earth (λ ≈ .74), Stable (λ ≈ .81), Responsible (λ ≈ .85)
• Activity: Active (λ ≈ .82), Dynamic (λ ≈ .86), Innovative (λ ≈ .78)
• Aggressiveness: Aggressive (λ ≈ .84), Bold (λ ≈ .82)
• Simplicity: Ordinary (λ ≈ .75), Simple (λ ≈ .80)
• Emotionality: Romantic (λ ≈ .84), Sentimental (λ ≈ .81)

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The NMBP is a highly parsimonious, self-report psychometric questionnaire designed for rapid administration in laboratory, field, and digital surveying environments.

• Test Type: Standardized multi-dimensional self-report rating scale.
• Construct Assessed: Brand Personality Profile across five latent dimensions.
• Total Item Count: 12 adjectival items.
• Dimensional Allocation:
  • Responsibility: 3 items (Items 1, 2, 3)
  • Activity: 3 items (Items 4, 5, 6)
  • Aggressiveness: 2 items (Items 7, 8)
  • Simplicity: 2 items (Items 9, 10)
  • Emotionality: 2 items (Items 11, 12)
• Response Format: 7-point Likert scale (1 = Not at all characteristic to 7 = Very characteristic).
• Administration Time: Approximately 2 to 3 minutes per brand evaluated.
• Target Population: Consumers aged 16 and older across diverse geographic and linguistic markets.
• Scoring Protocol: No reverse scoring is required. Dimensional scores are computed by calculating the arithmetic mean of the items comprising each subscale:
  • Responsibility Mean = (Item 1 + Item 2 + Item 3) / 3
  • Activity Mean = (Item 4 + Item 5 + Item 6) / 3
  • Aggressiveness Mean = (Item 7 + Item 8) / 2
  • Simplicity Mean = (Item 9 + Item 10) / 2
  • Emotionality Mean = (Item 11 + Item 12) / 2
• Interpretation: Scores range from 1.00 to 7.00 per dimension. Higher scores indicate stronger consumer attribution of that personality characteristic to the focal brand. Researchers frequently plot these five mean scores on radar charts (spider diagrams) or standardized profile graphs to benchmark against competitors or evaluate brand positioning over time.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The New Measure of Brand Personality was formally published in 2009 in the International Journal of Research in Marketing (Elsevier). As an academic psychometric instrument developed through university-funded research, the scale is generally accessible for non-commercial academic research, pedagogical use, and scholarly investigation without licensing fees, provided proper bibliographic citation is given to Geuens, Weijters, and De Wulf (2009).

Commercial entities, market research agencies, and corporate practitioners seeking to embed the scale within commercial brand equity software, syndicated tracking platforms, or client advisory products should consult the copyright guidelines of Elsevier or contact the primary authors at Ghent University to ensure compliance with commercial intellectual property regulations.

References

• Aaker, J. L. (1997). Dimensions of brand personality. Journal of Marketing Research, 34(3), 347–356. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224379703400304
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• Fornell, C., & Larcker, D. F. (1981). Evaluating structural equation models with unobservable variables and measurement error. Journal of Marketing Research, 18(1), 39–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224378101800104
• Fournier, S. (1998). Consumers and their brands: Developing relationship theory in consumer research. Journal of Consumer Research, 24(4), 343–373. https://doi.org/10.1086/209515
• Geuens, M., Weijters, B., & De Wulf, K. (2009). A new measure of brand personality. International Journal of Research in Marketing, 26(2), 97–107. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijresmar.2008.12.002
• Gilmore, G. W. (1919). Animism: Or, Thought currents of primitive peoples. Marshall Jones Company.
• Goldberg, L. R. (1990). An alternative “description of personality”: The Big-Five factor structure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59(6), 1216–1229. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.59.6.1216
• Hu, L. T., & Bentler, P. M. (1999). Cutoff criteria for fit indexes in covariance structure analysis: Conventional criteria versus new alternatives. Structural Equation Modeling: A Multidisciplinary Journal, 6(1), 1–55. https://doi.org/10.1080/10705519909540118
• Sirgy, M. J. (1982). Self-concept in consumer behavior: A critical review. Journal of Consumer Research, 9(3), 287–300. https://doi.org/10.1086/208924

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)