The relationship between consumer personality and brand personality: A study of social media preferences

In today's market conditions, due to the reduction of the differences between products and services for business to find new customers and to keep existing customers in their hands it is difficult. Under these conditions, one of the most important factors that will set their products and services different from other business offers and help to attract consumers is branding. The perception of a brand's personality plays an important role in the consumers decision in choosing a brand. Studies show that consumers lean towards brands that they perceive to have a compatible brand personality to their own personality. The aim of this study is to investigate the link between a consumers personality and the consumers perception of the brand's personality, which is a key point that determines their decision. In this context, this study will investigate two popular web based services brand personality; Facebook and Twitter. The scale was used to measure consumers' perception of brand personality is that which was developed by Aksoy ve Özsomer (2007), whereas the scale used for measuring the consumers own personalities the mini-markers personality scale as developed by Saucier (1994). This investigation will sample Facebook and Twitter users who live in the cities of Sakarya and Kocaeli with the conveinence sampling technique. The sample consists of 500 social media users. The method chosen to collect data is face-to-face surveys. The results that have been obtained show that there is a significant link between consumers personalities and how they perceive social media brand personalities. With regards to Facebook, there is a relationship between consumer's personality and their behavior in terms of the intention to continue using it and the likelihood of recommending to others, which cannot be said about Twitter.