Aamir needs Branding lessons

If the Chetan-Aamir feud's an engineered one, the biggest loser will be Aamir. To know why, you first need to know what Brand Personality is. Brand Personality is a set of human characteristics that become associated with a brand.

Aamir's quite the Bollywood brand. Some one's who's crafted his image carefully. He's tried to build himself up as the thinking, honest, sincere actor. That's the personality he's carefully crafted for himself. Sample his blog post;

'Have been going through your responses post the CB controversy. Some sincere and some insincere. The insincere ones I choose to ignore, but I am very keen to respond to those of you have had very sincere queries, questions and even assumptions. I am very keen to present my side of the story, why I said what, why I feel what I feel, and what is the difference between a book and a screenplay, what I feel about ethics of this issue, fair play, morality etc. The whole gamut. I would also like to present some very interesting evidence.

However I would not like to do this right now.

The reason is, that first of all, I think that it is very important that we distance ourselves from this incident to be unemotional about it, me included. Only then will we be able to examine the merits of the case in an unbiased and clinical manner. I am a very emotional person and find it very difficult to be clinical, so for me distance is most important.'

J. L. Aaker in his work, 'Dimensions of Brand Personality' (Journal of Marketing Research), identifies five basic dimensions on which consumers base brand Personality. They are, Sincerity, Excitement, Competence, Sophistication and Ruggedness. The dimensions that apply most to Aamir the brand, is 'sincerity' and 'competence'. Sincerity as a dimension in turn is a make-up of facets such as, Down-to-earth, Honest, Wholesome and Cheerful. Competence is driven by Reliability, Intelligence and Success. Aamir the brand will suffer on one of the two mentioned dimensions, should it be known that the feud was a hoax. Aamir then may no longer come across as 'Sincere.' On competence, he may continue to score. But sincerity will take a beating. The Personality he's carefully crafted may crumble.

Of course, even if the hoax is true there's no way to find out, unless one of the parties coughs it out (almost impossible, I must say). And even if one party sings like a canary, the other can play the denial card.

Its evident from the way Aamir's singing on his blog, he doesn't want any semblance of the hoax story to stick to him. 'Another reason is that I would not like any more undue publicity for or against anyone. A few responses have expressed that maybe this is a controversy that we have cooked up to get publicity for the film. This stance of mine should satisfy them too.'

I bet Aamir has had takeaways from this controversy. In the coming times, he's bound to shut up more often, than go yakety-yak. If he persists with the yakety-yak, I'd recommend he takes a lesson in Marketing, maybe two in Consumer Behaviour.