Emotional Brand Attachment and Brand Personality: The Relative Importance of the Actual and the
Ideal Self
Lucia Malär, Harley Krohmer, Wayne D. Hoyer, & Bettina Nyffenegger
Creating emotional brand attachment is a key branding issue in today’s marketing world. One way to
accomplish this is to match the brand’s personality with the consumer’s self.
Key question: is whether the brand’s personality should match the consumer’s actual self or the
consumer’s ideal self.
On the basis of two empirical studies of 167 brands (evaluated by 1329 and 980 consumers), the
authors show that the implications of selfcongruence for consumers’ emotional brand attachment
are complex and differ by consumers’ product involvement, consumers’ individual difference
variables, and the type of self-congruence (fit of the brand’s personality with the consumer’s actual
self versus with the consumer’s ideal self).
- On a general level, actual self-congruence has the greatest impact on emotional brand
attachment.
- Product involvement, self-esteem, and public self-consciousness increase the positive
impact of actual self-congruence but decrease the impact of ideal self-congruence on
emotional brand attachment.
The authors discuss important managerial and academic implications of these findings.
Increasingly, companies are searching for ways to create strong emotional brand connections with
consumers. This is motivated by the finding that such connections lead to higher levels of consumer
loyalty, which increases company financial performance
Example: Unilever’s Dove line has used models who are more average in appearance, presumably
corresponding more closely to how the majority of consumers actually see themselves (an “actual
self”). This approach hit a nerve with many consumers, causing them to form a strong emotional
connection with the brand. Thus, the “actual self” seems to be growing in importance to consumers
looking for reality and authenticity in marketing messages.
Nevertheless, other companies still create emotional connections with campaigns that focus on ideal
beauty. In other words, the “ideal self” seems to remain important because many consumers like
brands that do not fit with their actual reality but, rather, represent an aspiration
Thus, our study has two research objectives:
1) to understand the implications and the relative impact of consumers’ actual versus ideal self-
congruence on emotional brand attachment and
2) to gain insight into how the effect of actual versus ideal self-congruence on consumers’
emotional brand attachment varies across different contexts and consumers
Figure 1 presents our conceptual framework. Note that both actual and ideal self-congruence affect
the consumer’s emotional brand attachment. However, the influence of actual and ideal self-
congruence may vary, depending on the consumer’s level of product involvement, self-esteem, and
public self-consciousness. Our central assumption is that consumers use products as a way to define
themselves to others and purchase brands with a particular personality to express their self-concept
(Aaker 1999; Belk 1988).
, The concept of brand personality attributes human
characteristics or traits to a brand on the basis of a
consumer’s perception of that brand (Aaker 1997;
Geuens, Weijters, and De Wulf 2009; Grohmann
2009). Specifically, it has been suggested that brand
personality can be instrumental in helping
consumers express their self-concept and provide a
sense of comfort to consumers who have found a
brand that “fits” their self-concept (Aaker 1999;
Sirgy 1982).
The self-concept is defined as the cognitive and
affective understanding of who and what we are
and can take two forms: the “actual self” and the
“ideal self.” The actual self is based on the
perceived reality of oneself (i.e., who and what I
think I am now), whereas the ideal self is shaped by imagination of ideals and goals related to what a
person believes that he or she would like to be or aspire to become (Lazzari, Fioravanti, and Gough
1978; Wylie 1979).
Either way, the consumer can achieve self-congruence by consuming a brand with a personality that
he or she regards as similar to either the actual or ideal self. Actual self-congruence reflects the
consumer’s perception of the fit between the actual self and the brand’s personality, whereas ideal
self-congruence is the perceived fit of the brand personality with the consumer’s ideal self (Aaker
1999).
The dependent variable in our framework is “emotional brand attachment.” In psychology,
attachment is an emotion laden bond between a person and a specific object (Bowlby 1979). In a
marketing context, people can also build and maintain emotionally charged relationships with brands
(Belk 1988; Fournier
We examine three moderators of the relationship between the type of self-congruence and
emotional brand attachment: product involvement, self-esteem, and public self-consciousness.
Understanding these interaction effects can have important implications for the design and
implementation of a brand personality. Product involvement has important implications for
consumer information processing and has been shown to be an important contingency variable for
the success of various marketing strategies and activities .
When personally relevant knowledge is activated in memory, a motivational state is created that
energizes or drives consumers’ cognitive behavior
- Self-esteem refers to a person’s overall evaluation of his or her worthiness as a human being
- Self-consciousness as the awareness of the self as a social object or the awareness that
others are aware of the self. Thus, people with high public self-consciousness are more
aware of how others perceive them and try harder to create a favorable public image
