Abstract

With growing consumer demand for ethical products and resultant seismic shifts taking place in the industry as a response, it is imperative to better understand the effects of ethicality. Honing in on two such effects, the specific objective of this paper is to explore the question: How will ethical attributes affect the perception of brand personality dimensions of sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, and ruggedness and in turn how do these dimensions mediate the relationship between ethicality and brand equity? The paper makes use of past literature on the constructs of brand personality and brand equity and responds to the call to study the former as a driver of the latter. Since it has been suggested that particular personality dimensions may be more or less valuable than others (Keller and Lehmann, 2006), this research aims to explore whether particular brand personality dimensions have a greater impact on brand equity of ethical brands compared to others. Results show that ethicality has a positive direct effect on each of the brand personality dimensions and this effect is not moderated by price of the product. Ethicality also has a positive direct effect on overall brand equity. When controlling for ethical attribute relevance and brand personality, out of the five brand personality dimensions, only sophistication positively mediates the relationship between ethicality and overall brand equity.