De Chernatony Brand Pyramid
The Brand Pyramid
Leslie de Chernatony · University of Birmingham · 2006
Introduction
From Product Attributes to Brand Personality
The brand pyramid comes from Leslie de Chernatony's book From Brand Vision to Brand Evaluation. Quest (2019, p. 73) and Rossolatos (2012, p. 29) both reproduce it. It is a tool for building a new brand, not just a product. It follows how a product's features turn into something customers value: attributes lead to benefits, benefits to emotional rewards, rewards to values, and values to personality traits (Rossolatos, 2012, p. 29). The idea comes from Gutman's means-end theory. In it, the features that define a brand have consequences for consumers, and these consequences strengthen their values. The pyramid puts these steps in a fixed order, to be worked through one after another (Quest, 2019, pp. 70, 72–73). It looks at the brand from the inside, through the eyes of an employee or brand manager (Quest, 2019, p. 72). Tangible elements sit low and intangible ones, such as emotional rewards and personality traits, sit high (Quest, 2019, p. 73). Rossolatos (2012, pp. 28–29) calls it the brand essence pyramid, because he reads a brand's essence as these layers.
The Model
Elements
Definitions follow Rossolatos (2012, pp. 27–29), who describes the chain of levels with page references to de Chernatony's book, and Quest (2019, pp. 69–73), who places the pyramid in the means-end tradition. Quotes from de Chernatony's book are marked "as cited in". The levels follow the arrows of the figure, from the base upwards.
Five Levels, From the Base Up
01
Attributes
Attributes are the product's own features, and they form the base. Everything above them starts here. Quest counts them among the tangible elements that the pyramid keeps at the bottom (Quest, 2019, pp. 73, 165). For the core of a brand, de Chernatony suggests choosing up to three key attributes and building one ladder from each up to the personality traits (Rossolatos, 2012, p. 29).
02
Benefits
The second level shows what the attributes do for the consumer. The benefits then lead on to the emotional rewards above them (Rossolatos, 2012, p. 29). Quest explains the link with Gutman's theory: consumers gain benefits from what using a brand leads to, as white teeth come from a whitening toothpaste (Quest, 2019, pp. 71, 73).
03
Emotional Rewards
Benefits lead to emotional rewards, and these lead on to values (Rossolatos, 2012, p. 29). Quest names emotional rewards as an example of the intangible elements higher up in the hierarchy (Quest, 2019, p. 73). In Quest's reading of one consumer, the reward is a "positive sense of well-being" that the benefits create (Quest, 2019, p. 166).
Local cheese: A respondent in Quest's study of local food brands buys local cheese because her money supports producers who keep making it (attribute). It helps the local community and is healthy (benefits). It makes her feel good about helping the community (emotional reward), and this connects to her values. Quest sees here a ladder like de Chernatony's pyramid. The labels in brackets are Quest's coding, not the respondent's (Quest, 2019, pp. 163, 166).04
Values
Emotional rewards turn into values (Rossolatos, 2012, p. 29). De Chernatony separates core values from peripheral ones. Core values stay whatever happens around the brand and are central to it. Peripheral values are secondary and can be dropped or added (de Chernatony, 2006, p. 122, as cited in Rossolatos, 2012, p. 28). The core values make up the brand's essence (Rossolatos, 2012, p. 28). Quest defines values as "desirable end-states of existence" and notes that they guide what consumers choose (Quest, 2019, p. 71).
05
Personality Traits
On top, the brand's values show up as personality traits that people can recognise in it (Rossolatos, 2012, p. 29). The personality is a metaphor that pulls attributes, benefits and values together (Rossolatos, 2012, p. 28). De Chernatony says the metaphor helps customers: when the brand is treated as a person, even through a celebrity in its ads, it is "much easier to appreciate the emotional values of the brand" (de Chernatony, 2006, p. 40, as cited in Rossolatos, 2012, p. 27).
Source
- de Chernatony, L. (2006). From Brand Vision to Brand Evaluation: The Strategic Process of Growing and Strengthening Brands (2nd ed.). Butterworth-Heinemann.
- Quest, J. (2019). To Explore the Tangible Attributes Contributing to Brand Meaning: A Study of Local Food Brands [Doctoral thesis, Bournemouth University]. BURO. https://eprints.bournemouth.ac.uk/32730/
- Rossolatos, G. (2012). Applying Structuralist Semiotics to Brand Image Research. The Public Journal of Semiotics, 4(1), 25–82. https://doi.org/10.37693/pjos.2012.4.8838
Part of the Brand Identity Model Atlas. The atlas underpins the Brand-Building Canvas: a practical one-page brand identity and strategy framework for building, auditing, and repositioning brands. Download the PDF or PowerPoint template, or compare all brand identity models in the overview.