What’s the first thing you think of when you hear “Nike”? Is it a product, like a pair of Air Jordans? Or is it a feeling? For most people, it’s a feeling: determination, inspiration, the echo of a tagline that became a global mantra: “Just Do It” [1].
Brands like Nike have a personality—a set of human-like traits that consumers connect with on an emotional level. But how do you actually measure something as complex as a personality? For decades, researchers have relied on long, structured surveys. These are useful, but they can feel rigid and often miss the spontaneous, nuanced opinions that reveal what people really think.
This guide explores a different way. We'll look at how you can combine the depth of qualitative interviews with the reach of a survey, using AI-moderated conversations and just a handful of open-ended questions to map a brand’s personality. It’s a faster, richer, and more human way to conduct brand research.
Brand personality isn’t just marketing fluff; it’s the reason customers choose one brand over another, even when products are similar. It’s the difference between a brand you buy and a brand you believe in. Nike’s strategy has always been built on this idea, focusing on emotional storytelling to create a powerful sense of community and personal empowerment [1].
The challenge for researchers has always been capturing this essence authentically. Traditional methods, like using Aaker’s Brand Personality Scale, involve asking respondents to rate a brand across dozens of adjectives on a scale [2]. This gives you structured data, but it doesn’t always capture the why behind a feeling. You might learn that people find Nike "dignified" or "imaginative," but you won't hear the personal story or metaphor that brings that trait to life.
While established methods like Jennifer Aaker’s Brand Personality Scale remain highly relevant and widely used (see https://prophet.com), many researchers have found that open-ended questions can uncover far more nuanced insights. One study, for example, simply asked consumers to describe Nike as if it were a person, revealing traits like "active," "competitive," and "determined" that perfectly matched its heroic image [3].
The problem? Open-ended questions have always been notoriously difficult to manage at scale. Manually reading, coding, and analyzing thousands of free-text or audio responses is incredibly time-consuming and expensive.
So, you were left with a choice:
What if you didn't have to choose?
This is where technology creates a new path forward. AI-Moderated Interviews (AIMIs) are one-on-one, conversational interviews led by an AI that can adapt its questions in real time based on a person's responses [4]. Think of it as having a skilled human interviewer who can talk to thousands of people at once, in over 50 languages [5].
Platforms like Glaut use this approach to combine the best of both worlds. Here’s how it works:
This is what we mean by qualitative research at scale. It’s a new class of market research that doesn’t force you to trade depth for reach.
Let's put this into practice. Instead of a 42-item questionnaire, imagine you want to map NikeThanks to AI-moderated interviews (AIMIs), you can apply Jennifer Aaker's brand personality using framework—traditionally requiring a 42-item questionnaire—with just five open-ended questions in an AI-moderated interview single conversational flow.
Here’s one way you could approach it:
In a Glaut interview, each answer would trigger intelligent, adaptive follow-ups. The result isn't just a list of adjectives; it's a collection of stories, feelings, and metaphors that build a rich, multi-dimensional portrait of the brand.
The true revolution isn't just in collecting the data, but in analyzing it. An advanced market research software platform doesn't just hand you thousands of transcripts. It does the heavy lifting by:
You get a strategic report that visualizes the brand’s personality, grounded in the authentic voice of the consumer. This allows brand managers and agencies to move faster, validate creative ideas with more confidence, and ensure their strategy aligns with how the brand is truly perceived in the wild.
Understanding your brand's personality is fundamental to building a lasting connection with your audience. For too long, researchers have been constrained by the trade-off between the depth of qualitative methods and the scale of quantitative ones.
AI-moderated interviews are changing the equation. By enabling rich, open-ended conversations with thousands of people, platforms like Glaut are providing a faster, more consistent, and more insightful way to gather qualitative data [8].
This isn't about replacing researchers. It's about empowering them with a better tool—one that helps them get closer to the human truths that build iconic brands. The future of brand research is less about asking people to check boxes and more about starting a really good conversation.
