Measuring corporate personality: A critical review and new insights

This article aims to explore the perceived ‘personality’ of marketing objects and reveal new insights in the search for universal dimensions of corporate personality traits. A critical review of the literature sheds new light on the theoretical and methodological reasons for discrepancies in previous research results. In order to verify the reasons for the discrepancies, multi-stage qualitative and quantitative studies were conducted by applying a theoretically and methodologically well-grounded psycho-lexical procedure and multilevel approach. The comparison between our results and the results obtained in previous studies enabled identifying four universal personality dimensions in the perception of companies: Innovativeness/Enterprise, Openness to Others, Stability and Machiavellianism. Newly developed scales enable the measurement of these dimensions on both a company (for between-company comparisons) and an individual (for between-customer within-company comparisons) levels.