Assessing Brand-Consumer Personality Congruence on Twitter: A Computational Textual Analysis Approach

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Date
2020
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Publisher
University of Alabama Libraries
Abstract

Brands gain importance to consumers when the consumer supplies meaning or value to the brand (McCracken, 1993). BP allows consumers to use brands for self-expression (deChernatony, 1999; Johar & Sirgy; 1991; McCracken, 1986) and establish relationships with brands (Fournier, 1998; Keller, 2003; Meenaghan, 1995). Research shows that consumers are attracted to brands that align with their own personality traits (Escalas & Bettman, 2005; Johar et al., 2005; Landon, 1974). Brand personality has become an integral part of a brand’s social media presence. However, the few researchers who are exploring the role of personality in a brand's social media communications are opting to use Aaker's (1997) BP questionnaire (Xu et al., 2016) or psychologist personality measures (Pentina, Zhang, & Basmanova, 2013; Yun et al., 2019). This study will utilize the computational textual analysis software Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC; Pennebaker, Francis, & King, 2001) and a custom adapted adjective-based dictionary (Opoku, 2006) to examine BP in brand communication on Twitter. The primary goal of this study was to examine whether consumer engagement, either directly with specific highly social brands or just within a product type, moderates the effect of brand/consumer personality congruence. Towards these ends, we found that consumers who engage with brands identified as highly social are more likely to exhibit personality congruence than consumers who are engaging with a product type. The analysis revealed that the BP dimension has a direct impact on whether consumers engaging with the brand demonstrate congruence.

Description
Electronic Thesis or Dissertation
Keywords
Brand Personality, Brand-Consumer Relationship, Congruence, LIWC, Personality, Textual Analysis
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