Brands play a major role in society today. Certain brands seem to be flooding our current market while others remain prestige and only attainable by those with sufficient funds or status. Do brands really influence us as consumers that much? Do we really have a choice in the current consumer market or do brands define our purchases? If so, how does brand personality affect our own human personality? Value and its subjectivity is an important concept to understand when looking at brand value and its market power. Factors such as memory, socio-economic status and culture all affect an individual’s perception towards value. Materialism is a way of life, a manner in which people attach themselves to material objects. This is done to increase self-worth by putting possessions at the centre of our lives and using these to determine happiness and to define success. In understanding this we have the ability to critique brand personality and its effect on society. This paper will argue that a brands personality is the main catalyst of change to an individual’s personality. This questions the presence and importance of our own personality if we purchase brands to portray another.
Value varies from person to person and product to product, influencing consumers to purchase certain brands which they see valuable. Value highlights the buyers/owners desire to exchange a certain product or service (Neap et al, 1999). This concept of value only really relates to the product or service. Barwise in his text Brands as ‘separable assets’ argues that a true sense of value comes from the whole business, he suggests that to separate a product from a business is ‘impossible’ (Barwise, 1990). This suggests the importance of brands and the organisations behind these brands.
Value is very subjective (Neap et al, 1999) as people are very different. Value is affected by three