Famous brands, Professor Rohini Ahluwalia says, have long been known to have personalities. When we think of Campbell's, we associate it with sincerity and warmth, while Nike evokes an aggressive, athletic image. These personalities not only reach out to consumers, they help consumers reach out to each other by serving as vehicles for self-expression. But how can managers better harness the potential of brand personality?

"We know that a brand's personality helps humanize products and helps build strong relationships between the brand and the buyer," Ahluwalia explains. "Further, by signaling important attributes in social settings, brand personality can facilitate social interactions or build relationships." Along with her co-authors, Ahluwalia recently sought to uncover which traits might matter most to which consumers, ultimately determining their brand loyalty, brand attachment, and purchase likelihood.

Their results, forthcoming in the Journal of Consumer Research, showed that individuals' attachment - or relationship - style is an important factor in determining the potential impact of a brand's personality in the marketplace. Specifically, Ahluwalia found that "anxiously" attached people were most likely to discriminate among brands based on personality, tending to choose brands based on traits they saw as important for building or maintaining interpersonal relationships.

Among those anxious consumers, the researchers also discovered a second level of differentiation: level of avoidance (basically, a positive or negative view of other people and the resulting desire to interact with them). Those consumers who were labeled "high anxiety, high avoidance" - those who didn't think highly of other people - chose brands seen as exciting, while those who were "high anxiety, low avoidance" sought out more sincere brands (and deeper relationships).

Most importantly for practitioners, Ahluwalia reveals that her results are broadly applicable: "The attachment style patterns we identify in consumers replicate across different product categories - shoes, clocks, clothing - and among well-known brands, brand extensions, and even new and unfamiliar brands." By thinking creatively and designing rigorous experiments to test her hypotheses about "how consumers travel the road from brand preference to brand loyalty," Ahluwalia has become a reliable source of timely insights for smart marketers and buyers. Her article, "When Brand Personality Matters: The Moderating Role of Attachment Styles," co-authored with Vanitha Swaminathan and Karen M. Stilley (both of the University of Pittsburgh), will appear in the April 2009 issue of JCR.