Local combats global: simulacrum of brand personality for tea brands

Brand Personality is the simulacrum of human traits used to describe the personality of brands. In the arena of marketing, firms are struggling hard to impinge their brand image as a person in the minds of its customers. The idea behind is that when a customer perceives its favorite brand as a personality, it will develop certain associations and belongingness for that brand. Customers more affinity to personality of brand leads towards more loyalty and ultimately fruitful for the generic firm who introduced the brand and brand personality for its product. The study empirically assesses the impact of brand personality in the mind of customers for two famous tea brands of Pakistan. Both brands have nearly equal share in the market but one is local and other is global. The data was collected from the territory of Islamabad, Pakistan by taking the sample of 436 in total. By employing the area sampling, data was equally divided into two equal halves of 218 samples respectively. First half of the respondents were the user of local tea brand while the second half of the respondents were the user of global tea brand. Aaker scale of brand personality was employed to measure the personality of tea brands. An independent sample t test was utilized to check the customers differentiation. It was observed that customers perceived the both brands as more rugged and sincere. These characteristics are important and relevant for any tea brand to be successful in the market. That why, both brands are sharing almost equal share in the market. However, global tea brand is perceived more sophisticated, competent and with full of excitement as compared to local brand. At the moment, the disparity of these personality characteristics are not affecting the market share of local brand but it is urged that for long lasting and sustainability competition, the local brand should also focus on the dimensions of brand personality of sophistication, competence and excitement.