Emotional Brand Attachment and Brand Personality: The Relative Importance of the Actual and the Ideal Self

TLDR

Emotional brand attachment is a critical marketing goal, often pursued by aligning a brand’s personality with consumers’ self-concepts. This study examines whether matching a brand’s personality to consumers’ actual self or ideal self better fosters emotional attachment. Across two studies involving 167 brands and 1,309–980 consumers, actual self‑congruence consistently produced stronger emotional attachment, especially for highly involved products and consumers with high self‑esteem or public self‑consciousness, while ideal self‑congruence had a weaker effect.

Abstract

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. A key question, however, 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 self-congruence 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.