Exploring the sources and variations of digital brand personality across touchpoints

Brand personality theory contends that consumers perceive brands as having humanlike personalities and form relationships with them that are analogous to interpersonal relationships (Fournier, 1998; Aaker, 1997). More recently, research on brand personality has ventured into the digital world (Ghorbani et al., 2022a). Numerous studies have demonstrated that a strong digital brand personality has positive effects on consumer behaviours, including an increase in social media brand engagement (Bernritter et al., 2016; Lee et al., 2018), electronic word-of-mouth (Torres and Augusto, 2019), and purchase intentions (Lee and Cho, 2017). Thus, creating and managing a digital brand personality across digital touchpoints should be a main priority for brand managers (Lara-Rodríguez et al., 2019). Up to date, no research has systematically explored whether and how consumers’ perceptions of digital brand personality may vary in dimensionality or strength if compared across digital touchpoints. To fill this research void, the present research embarks on studying how digital brand personality perceptions are constructed and how they may vary across digital touchpoints. Particular attention is directed towards the role of the digital touchpoints themselves in shaping consumers’ experiences and perceptions of brands.