Shaping Retail Brand Personality Perceptions by Bodily Experiences

• We merge the research streams of customer experiences and brand personality.
• Bodily experiences transfer their metaphoric meaning to brand personality perception.
• We manipulated bodily experiences of hardness and ambient temperature.
• Results are consistent across field and laboratory experiments and across brands.
• Our findings are highly applicable for retail managers to shape brand perceptions.

Customer experiences play an important role in retail brand management. This research investigates how bodily experiences in retail environments influence customers’ perceptions of retail brand personalities. Based on research on human personality perception, we propose that bodily experiences transfer metaphoric meaning to customers’ brand perceptions. In a field experiment and a lab experiment we manipulated participants’ bodily experiences (feeling of hardness and temperature) and consistently found a metaphor-specific transfer of experiences to retail brand personality perceptions (on the dimensions “ruggedness” and “warmth”). A third study reveals the mechanism behind the effect and demonstrates concept activation elicited by bodily experiences in customers’ minds.

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