The Effect of Repositioning on Brand Personality : An Empirical Study on Blackberry Mobile Phones

This study focuses on measuring the brand personality of BlackBerry mobile phone to find out the changes in brand image after repositioning and targeting youth, and exploring the model validity of Jennifer Aaker's Brand Personality Scale. The random sampling method was used to collect primary data from different management and engineering colleges of twin cities of Bhubaneswar and Cuttack in India. 695 surveys were conducted, of which 601 respondents had responded and only 417 had filled the questionnaire properly. To perform exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis, the sample was divided into two equal parts by randomly selecting about 50% of cases using the filtering algorithm in SPSS (Roy and Vaibhav, 2010). Sample 1 had 209 respondents and sample 2 had 208 respondents. Next, an exploratory factor analysis was performed (on sample 1) on the 38 items of brand personality using the principal component analysis with Varimax rotation. The major findings were: sophistication is the most important brand personality dimension of BlackBerry, followed by excitement and ruggedness. Sincerity and competence are not important brand personality dimensions. In sophistication, upper-class is the most important item, followed by charming, smooth and glamorous. In excitement, up-to-date is the most important item, followed by independent, imaginative, exciting and cool. In ruggedness, outdoorsy is the most important item, followed by tough, Western and masculine. So, the company should project sophistication as an important brand personality dimension rather than competence after repositioning the brand while targeting Indian youth