Considerable attention has been given to the notion of a set of humanlike
characteristics associated with brands, referred to as “brand
personality.” The authors combine newly available machine learning
techniques with functional neuroimaging data to characterize the set of
processes that give rise to these associations. The authors show that
brand personality traits can be captured by the weighted activity across a
widely distributed set of brain regions previously implicated in reasoning,
imagery, and affective processing. That is, as opposed to being
constructed through reflective processes, brand personality traits seem
to exist a priori inside consumers’ minds, such that the authors are able
to predict what brand a person is thinking about solely on the basis of the
relationship between brand personality associations and brain activity.
These findings represent an important advance in the application of
neuroscientific methods to consumer research, moving from work
focused on cataloging brain regions associated with marketing stimuli to
testing and refining constructs central to theories of consumer behavior.