Brand Personality



Brand Personality

To: VP of Marketing

From: Product Manager

Subject: Brand and Brand Positioning

Date: January 28, 2011

Dear Sir/Madam,

I am working as a product manager and specially design the brand personality of “Aunt Jemima”. I also enclosed the complete detail about this brand.

Detailed Introduction

Brands are a complex pattern of relationships between companies and their products and consumers and their lifestyles. They arise not only from logo, slogan and advertising, but also from experiences, needs, ideas and opinions of consumers (Swaminathan 2009). They provide symbolic, emotional and constantly changing frame of reference for consumers to facilitate the orientation on the market.

Analysis

Brands can be positioned on the basis of human qualities, such as sincerity (e.g., honest, down-to-earth), excitement (e.g., trendy, cool), competence (e.g., intelligent, hard-working), sophistication (e.g., good-looking, glamorous), and ruggedness. Brand personalities, defined as human characteristics associated with a brand, are an important element of the image for brands. Indeed, brand personality is one of the most compelling aspects of many popular brands. The first notable example is that of Aunt Jemima, Founded in 1889 by two entrepreneurs Chris Rutt and Charles Underwood who had developed a special cake flour and sought a trademark for this product. Rutt chooses the name "Aunt Jemima" after attending a performance of comedy in which a black actress sang a popular song and traditional "Old Aunt Jemima". He immediately understood the power of the image evoked by song in that, at this time post-slavery, the black was still the stereotype of the docile servant always ready to serve humbly. Among the black slaves, women were often assigned to work in the kitchens which corresponded well to the product developed by Rutt and Underwood (Ballantyne 2006). The brand enjoyed a great success and Aunt Jemima appeared in person at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893 where, personalized by Nancy Green a woman of 59 years, she served pancakes, sang songs and told stories of Old South during the whole show. Despite the popularity of his character brand, the company filed for bankruptcy and was sold in 1926 to Quaker Oats Company which made her grow.

The companies are then quickly realizing the power of the character. This can help to answer a popular demand of consumers that their products are presented in a way that gives the look and feel of a close relationship. The problem is for influential business to establish or restore a relationship directly as possible between it and the client, between production and consumption, supply and demand.

The first is that the notion of character is multifaceted and evolving. It attempt to define the character means to put in the context of evolution of marketing, advertising techniques and media. Now we can see that the character is closely related to traditional advertising as it implemented during the long period of mass marketing. The character is emblematic of the brand in terms of identity but is also emblematic of mass advertising in terms of practice.

Thus, the conflicting studies focus on the ability of the ...