International Journal of Social Sciences

Jennifer Aaker’s Brand Personality Scale (BPS) has served as a central instrument in marketing research for over two decades. The scale identified five core dimensions of brand personality: Sincerity, Excitement, Competence, Sophistication, and Ruggedness. However, it has attracted significant criticism over the years, primarily in four areas: conceptual ambiguity, structural inconsistencies in dimensionality, methodological limitations, and semantic and contextual constraints.

The conceptual domain highlights how Aaker’s framework often conflates the constructs of personality and image. The dimensional structure has proven difficult to replicate across different cultures and industries, where new dimensions have emerged, or the five-factor model has failed to hold. Methodologically, the reliance on personification instructions and factor analysis may have artificially constructed the illusion of personality traits. Lastly, the semantic and contextual domain emphasizes that many terms used in the BPS lack precision and fail to reflect genuine personality traits, complicating cross-cultural interpretation and application.

This paper proposes a new four-domain analytical framework for a deeper critique of the BPS and concludes that the development of a new theoretical model is necessary—one that is conceptually clear, culturally adaptable, methodologically robust, and semantically accurate.

Such a model should incorporate clearly defined personality traits, a flexible dimensional structure, inclusion of negative aspects, and multi-perspective methodological approaches to more effectively capture brand personality in the 21st century.

Keywords: Brand personality, Aaker’s scale, Critical analysis, Conceptual foundations, Dimensional structure, Cultural adaptation, Methodological integrity, Semantic accuracy, New model development.

Article DOI: https://doi.org/10.55367/BSOS5827