Abstract

Brand personality, as one of the major components of brand identity, is a significant determinant of brand equity. This study investigates the configural invariance of a 42-item brand personality scale that was suggested by Aaker (1997) by extending its use from her U.S. sample to Anglophone and Francophone ethnic groups and some popular brands in Canada. Following a translation of the brand personality scale from English to French and two pilot studies for selecting 30 brands for the study, a stratified area sampling plan was executed to collect data from Anglophones and Francophones in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. 1959 questionnaires were distributed by field workers using area sampling within each selected census tract and 596 usable responses were received by mail. After classifying the respondents into Anglophones or Francophones in terms of their responses to a multi-item scale involving language use and self-identification of ethnicity, confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to assess the configural invariance of the brand personality scale. The results suggest that the factor structure for both ethnic groups are different than the structure suggested by Aaker (1997) for her U.S. study. Exploratory factor analysis of the data for each ethnic group suggests five factors as in Aaker's study. However, the composition of the factors in terms of the items of the scale is different from hers. The orthogonal rotation of the factor pattern matrices to congruence shows that the factor loadings for the two Canadian ethnic groups are very similar.