PhD Oral Exam - Leila Yousefi, Business Administration

When studying for a doctoral degree (PhD), candidates submit a thesis that provides a critical review of the current state of knowledge of the thesis subject as well as the student’s own contributions to the subject. The distinguishing criterion of doctoral graduate research is a significant and original contribution to knowledge.

Once accepted, the candidate presents the thesis orally. This oral exam is open to the public.

Abstract

Brands today are built around people as much as products. Human brands invite social reading, audiences respond to traits, intentions, and authenticity, not just to functional attributes. Thus, tools designed for products do not fully capture how audiences read and respond to people, especially celebrities. I develop a textbased personality measure for human brands by integrating Aaker's brand personality framework with the Big Five personality traits. The measure is trained on multiple language corpora using LIWCstyle features and transformer embeddings and evaluated with fivefold cross-validated mean accuracy scores. The results show significant improvement over existing methods.

Chapter 2 of this study applies this measure to the film industry, testing the hypothesis that persona-role congruence can serve as a predictor of box office revenues, particularly with respect to recognition- and genre-specific influences. Outcomes are estimated for opening weekend and domestic totals with rich controls and clustered standard errors. The results show that persona-role congruence, on its own, is not predictive; it becomes informative only when contextualized by genre and artistic recognition, which frame audience expectations. Genre sets which traits matter (some reward congruence, others favor incongruence, some are indifferent), while artistic recognition tends to reward stretch over sameness, reducing the payoff to holistic congruence for recognized actors. In that context, congruence works chiefly as an early heuristic: effects are stronger at opening weekend and often fade over the full run.

In summary, the rigorous methodological framework developed throughout this work proposes an innovative method to measure human brands on Big Five personality traits with greater efficiency and accuracy and represents a substantial rethinking of how personality assessments are conducted for human brands, particularly in the film industry. By combining empirical measures with established psychological theories, the study provides an operational tool and actionable insights for filmmakers and marketers on casting, positioning, and communication decisions in an expectation-driven and time-sensitive market.