Sources of retailer personality: Private brand perceptions

This study focuses on the impact of two antecedents of retailer personality (grasped by five personality traits: introversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, sophistication and disingenuousness), on trust and attitude toward the private brand, as well as on one major consequence of these three concepts, loyalty to the retailer. Data were collected through a natural experiment on a convenience sample of 226 consumers of a French grocery retailer. Using partial least squares analysis (PLS), our results mainly indicated that (1) private brand trust has a positive and significant influence on the retailer personality traits “conscientiousness” and “sophistication” (2) private brand trust and private brand attitude have a positive and significant influence on the retailer personality trait “agreeableness” (3) trust and attitude toward the private brand have a positive and significant influence loyalty to the retailer while retailer personality traits have no influence on this variable. This research fills a gap in the literature since few studies have looked at the antecedents of retailer personality. Moreover, it reinforces the strategic importance of private brands for retailers since they have the potential to improve retailer personality and loyalty to the retailer.