With the shift from a transaction-based economy to a relationship-based economy, a social-psychological understanding of brands has developed in both practice and research over the past two decades. According to this understanding, consumers seek an authentic and trustworthy relationship partner. The brand must act as an active interaction partner and possess a brand personality. Marcus Hattula specifies the concept of brand personality. He presents the trait concept as an analytical unit, develops variants of brand personality, and creates a comprehensive list of terms for operationalization. Building on the approach of contextualism, he derives hypotheses about the influence of the brands in question and the judging consumers on the structure of brand personality and empirically tests these for the German automotive market.