Brand Personality and Social Media Platforms: The Search for the Perfect Match - A quantitative study of personality congruence on social media advertising

Abstract: Social media is a widely popular phenomenon and it never fails to fascinate how it touches so many people's lives around the world on a daily basis. The amount of content being transmitted through these kinds of online platforms have completely exploded during the past couple of years and social media sites have become an important player for brands to use when it comes to influencing different aspects of advertising effectiveness such as awareness, attitude, and behavioural intention. Despite this, limited studies have been done concerning advertising online and huge research gaps exist. Thematic congruence and self-congruence are successful marketing concepts commonly used in traditional marketing today and being such solid theories the aim of this experiment was to test if similar theories, with the additional aspect of brand personalities, could be applied to social media advertising. Findings show that even though the concept of congruence has proved to be an effective tactic to live by in traditional media marketing, social media marketing cannot be handled and above all, predicted in the same way. What should not be brushed under the rug however, is that congruency between an advertised brand personality and the brand personality of a social media platform do show tendencies to affect advertising effectiveness, making this paper a solid benchmark to build further research on.