Brand personality and hairy bikers

Let’s talk Harley-Davidson motorbikes. I’m not a biker, but the brand’s personality fascinates me for all the right and wrong reasons. Harley has one of the strongest, most characteristic brand personalities. Personified, Harley wears a big bushy beard and disreputable leathers. The persona is a rough-and-tumble rebel who has taken to the open road. It epitomizes freedom.

What’s wrong with the picture?

Brand personality personifies products and services by giving them a human face. The buyer recognizes themselves in the projected identity and forms an image on which is based an emotional attachment. It creates an association with the buyer, and builds loyalty, trust and a differential.

Harley-Davidson is an expensive brand. Its element of wish-fulfillment through freedom and its legacy rebellion is at odds with the reality of those who can afford it, individuals with high salaries and professional commitments. The brand also needs to expand its market. That means shifting the market into the realms of women and individuals of colour, again at odds with its archetype. Finally, the brand has to shift into the EV market, something which it is struggling with according to 2023 reports.

Harley-Davidson evolved into a personality rooted in the Jungian archetype of the rebel. The Jungian archetypes fix character archetypes into stories. If you watch or read stories regularly, you will know that the combination of a story and a character have a generally predictable outcome. The rigid confines of personality and story do not sit well with Harley’s need, even though it is taking the long-term route of shifting to the idea of freedom. Jungian archetypes can become a trap.

Let me introduce you to an alternative personality schema. Jennifer Aaker (not to be confused with David Aaker), a behavioral scientist, developed a methodology for assigning personality that is worthy of consideration. Aaker used a research process to identify five dimensions of personality that are generally common and trigger positive identification in the audience.

Her five broad dimensions are sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication and ruggedness.

Each of these dimensions can be viewed as a silo, holding characteristics. For instance, Harley would fall into the rugged silo which contains two characteristics, outdoorsy and tough. The interesting thing is that there are multiple dimensions, so alongside the rugged dimension, you might select a characteristic from the excitement dimension, for instance, spiritedness.

Use of primary dimension characteristics and characteristics from wing dimensions will give a more multifaceted personality in which characteristics can be managed both holistically and individually, outside of the confines of the Jungian story.

What I find interesting is that Jennifer Aaker has provided a universal model which is based on the responses of respondents from the USA. As it is a model, it might with a bit of research, be confidently adapted to regional dimensions and characteristics.

Since the advent of social media, I have regularly been confronted with the characteristic of humility (I am humble). What is the social benefit of being humble, what are its characteristics, where might this sit in Jennifer Aaker’s scale of dimensions and how might it transfer to the identity and image complex?

If you want to find out more about this, use the search prompts ‘Jungian character archetypes’ and ‘Jennifer Aaker brand personality dimensions’.