Reliable Nokia-Brand Personality Perceptions of the Finnish Communication Giant

This paper reports on Generation Y students’ brand personality perceptions of the Nokia mobile phone brand. The Generation Y cohort, are the first generation to have been brought up in the mobile telephony era and, consequently, present as a salient current and future segment for mobile device manufacturers and marketers. A brand’s personality is known to increase consumers’ preference for and usage of a brand, which may result in stronger emotional ties and loyalty towards that brand and, ultimately, a sustainable competitive advantage for that brand. A self-administered questionnaire was used to gather data from a sample of 1822 Generation Y students aged between 18 and 24 years, registered at two South African public higher education institutions. The questionnaire comprised 66 brand personality traits of symbolic products, anchored on a five-point Likert-type scale. Participants were requested to indicate the extent to which each of those traits reflected the Nokia brand. The captured data was analyzed using descriptive statistics and a t-test. The findings suggest that Generation Y students perceive the Nokia brand to be “reliable”, “trustworthy” and “intelligent”. The findings also suggest that African respondents have a notable higher brand personality perception of the Nokia brand than White respondents.