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CONCLUSIONS
The results of the studies presented in this paper suggest that the Five Factor Model may
serve as a metaphor for the description of brands, products and service characteristics, only to
a limited extent. When considering brand personalities the structures that emerged were
substantially divergent from the Big Five model. When assessing personality of targets other
than persons, namely brands, dimensions underlying personality descriptors tend to diminish.
It follows that the main traits are not the same when describing human personality and brands
personality. Moreover, the same attributes locate under different factors when describing
human personality and when describing brands personality. These considerations lead to the
conclusion that the traits which describe human personality are usable in shaping and
describing brands personality only to a certain extent and under certain conditions. It is
likely that other traits specific to brands and extraneous to human personality should be taken
into account to achieve a comprehensive picture of brand personality. This argument is
sustained by the findings of studies in which attributes related to brand notoriety, availability,
convenience, functionality, and benefits (such as economical, convenient, available, useful,
easy, well-known, famous, great) have been added to Big Five markers in describing brands
personality (Caprara and Barbaranelli 1996).
According to these results, the factors found in the analyses of brands personality do not
exhaust all the possible relevant characteristics of the brands that are important in the
perception of consumers. One may guess that consumers reserve some "mental space" to
characteristics that describe brands personality other than those provided by the FFM. Since
the number of information to be mentally processed is not unlimited, it is likely that the
restriction in categories derived from the description of human personality be complemented
by other categories extraneous to humans and specific to brands.

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The tendency of attributes to locate under different factors is clear when comparing
descriptions of different brands. In this regard, it is worthwhile to remember that several
markers shfted from one factor to another depending on the brand being described. This may
resemble what has been named as "concept-scale interaction" within the semantic differential
approach to the study of connotative meanings of concepts (see Heise 1969; Kubiniec and
Bean 1978; Mann, Phillips, and Thompson 1979; Osgood, Suci, and Tannenbaum 1957).
With this label researchers made reference to the fact that the meaning of an attribute, and its
relation with other attributes, varies according to the concept the attribute is referred to.
Indeed, relationships among attributes are not determined by the sharing of a common
component independent of the concept.
At the core of concept-scale interaction there is the fact that attributes may have different
degrees of relevance for different concepts; in fact, if an attribute is irrelevant to a concept,
ratings on it will have low correlations with ratings on other attributes that are relevant to the
concept, thus the attribute will have a factor location different from its usual one. Likely this
implies that attributes have a "contextual" or "relational" meaning, that is, attributes convey
different meanings as they move from one dimension to another, according to the brand they
are describing. Our preliminary hypothesis is that when evaluating a brand through attributes,
the brand function as a prime which leads to select out of available attributes the latent
structure which is compatible with the most comprehensive description of the target within
the limited number of information-units (categories) that can be mentally processed. In this

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regard we are inclined to believe that, for brands as for human personality, descriptors can be
ultimately traced to a limited number of categories (between 5-7) in analogy to what happens
in other cognitive domains (Miller 1956). Then we are inclined to believe that when
transporting descriptors from human personality to brands the number of categories which
emerge when describing humans tends to restrict, so to leave "mental space" to other
categories which are specific of brands.
Though the Five Factor Model is well established in the field of human personality
description and assessment, it needs to be revised when it is applied to entities other than
human stimuli (i.e., brands and products). Rather, the psycholexical approach provides a
useful model for the marketing domain, leading the search for marker-attributes and for the
latent structure they identify. In this regard, the personality metaphor is still plausible for
understanding consumers perceptions of non-human stimuli. The sedimentation hypothesis,
in particular, is plausible also for investigating brand attributes. However, the meanings of
terms should be empirically ascertained in each case. In fact, some words assume different
meanings when used to describe different entities, as happens in the studies presented in this
paper.
The psycholexical approach has three main advantages. It is: (a) parsimonious, because it
allows for choice among attributes that communicate the main personality traits of the brand
without neglecting important features, in favor of less important or even redundant ones; (b)
trenchant, because it allows for sending specific messages able to reinforce the weakest
aspects of the brand personality when compared with its competitor; (c) reliable, because it
allows for making adequate comparisons between subjects, situations, and targets, avoiding
gathering descriptors which belong to separate dimensions. The implications of these findings
for social and political marketing are important topics for future research.

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