Persona-fied brands: managing branded persons through persona |
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Authors: | Delphine Dion Eric Arnould |
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Affiliation: | 1. Department of Marketing, ESSEC Business School, Cergy Pontoise, France;2. Department of Marketing and Management, Southern Denmark University, Odense, Denmark |
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Abstract: | We investigate how the concept of persona can be used in managing brand persona-fication. Based on interviews with informants working across the gastronomy sector, we examine the characteristics of the chef persona, and the role that chef persona plays in restaurant management. We differentiate persona-fied brands from other human brands, we dimensionalise the chef persona, and we identify two possible models of brand management through persona: (1) the distributed or fragmented persona-fication of the brand, which is based on a disjunction of different facets of the brand persona, each embodied in different persons; and (2) the unified persona-fication of the brand, which is based on the conjunction of the different facets of the brand persona. Here, the persona is embodied in a single person who embodies the different facets of the brand persona. Our analysis surfaces theoretical resonance with the performative turn in marketing scholarship. |
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Keywords: | Brand personification performativity persona human brand retail experience luxury restaurant |
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