The domain adjustment problem in the context of product brands: does user-imagery allow a human-to-human comparison?

Extant literature on self-image congruence has not yet come up with an answer to the question of whether the structure of traits describing individual personality differences is identical with the structure of attributes in terms of which consumers compare themselves to typical brand users. Providing a conceptual and methodological review of the literature, this paper applies a peer-rating, psycholexical approach to test the congruence between the structure of personality-trait lexicon of a brand user with the structure of personality lexicon of the natural language. Results of analyses of the personality lexicon structure reveal that typical brand users are described using fewer dimensions than human personality. The study concludes that personality scales developed on the basis of lexical material including the consumer context, and complying with the psycholexical methodology derived from human personality study, can be applied to self-image congruence research.