Persona-fied brands: managing branded persons through persona

We investigate how the concept of persona can be used in managing
brand persona-fication. Based on interviews with informants
working across the gastronomy sector, we examine the characteristics
of the chef persona, and the role that chef persona plays in
restaurant management. We differentiate persona-fied brands
from other human brands, we dimensionalise the chef persona,
and we identify two possible models of brand management
through persona: (1) the distributed or fragmented persona-fication
of the brand, which is based on a disjunction of different
facets of the brand persona, each embodied in different persons;
and (2) the unified persona-fication of the brand, which is based
on the conjunction of the different facets of the brand persona.
Here, the persona is embodied in a single person who embodies
the different facets of the brand persona. Our analysis surfaces
theoretical resonance with the performative turn in marketing
scholarship.