BRAND PERSONALITY OF SHOPPING DISTRICTS - ORCHARD BELT AND MARINA CENTRE

Abstract

Brand personality is a set of human characteristics associated with a brand (Aaker 1997, 2001). The perspective that the researcher is exploring, is to explore the abstract nature of applying brand personality to the branding of shopping districts in Singapore. In this research, the brand personality traits of Aaker (1997) will be adopted to determine the brand personality of shopping districts in Singapore. A recent work in US by Siguaw et al (1999) was one of the first attempts to measure brand personality of real estate - restaurants. Further research by Ibrahim (2004) attempted to find out the brand personality of housing estates in Singapore. However, there is no researcher that has attempted to study on the brand personality of shopping districts which brings us to the main objective of this study; to establish firstly, the brand personality of Orchard Belt and Marina Centre (if any), secondly the differences in personalities (if any) and lastly the correlation between a respondents' perceived personality traits and the same traits which apply to the shopping district he prefers. After a detailed qualitative and quantitative analysis, it has been found out that both the shopping districts do indeed have distinctive personalities. However, the brand personality of Orchard Belt is more evident than that of Marina Centre which resulted in a stronger correlation between similarities between a respondents' perceived personality traits and the same traits which apply to the shopping district he prefers. Implications of these results will be offered for use in real world planning and management branding strategies of the two shopping districts.