UNESCO World Heritage Sites (WHSs) must necessarily display Outstanding Universal Values (OUVs), as these play a vital role in constructing competitive brand personality (BP) in tourism marketing. However, how these WHS qualities are perceived by visitors still needs substantial investigation. Adopting a visitor-driven approach, this study seeks to explore the intangible attributes of WHSs and, for the first time, uses the BP concept to measure these attributes in cultural attractions. To investigate how visitors perceive WHS personality traits, 5579 visitor-generated reviews of 175 French (39), German (44), Italian (50), and Spanish (42) cultural WHSs on TripAdvisor were analysed using empirical, mixed methods. Results show that four personality dimension categories can be attributed to WHSs: Sophistication, Sincerity, Competence, and Excitement. Moreover, a novel BP lexical technique is presented along with a 222-item personality trait dictionary, which can be used to measure personality traits in cultural attractions. Theoretical and practical implications of the study are also discussed.
Despite having received considerable academic attention, existing brand personality (BP) scales are difficult to generalize and likely need further development. The aim of this study was to design a novel method for constructing context driven-BP categories through the use of a multi-disciplinary approach and advances in personality studies in psychology and natural language processing. Based on a textual analysis that relies on devising hypotheses of psycholexical representation and the distributed representation of words, the aforementioned method was employed to explore World Heritage Site (WHS) personalities using information from all 1,121 UNESCO World Heritage Sites (WHSs) and 9,920 user-generated reviews on TripAdvisor. The study identified a 192-item WHS personality dictionary organized into five clusters: Exceptionality; Attractiveness; Identification; Responsibility; and Prominence. These categories could be employed to measure other tourism attractions. The results show that UNESCO strongly associates WHSs with the attributes of Attractiveness and Identification.
World Heritage Sites (WHSs) are perceived as significant tourism brands. However, there is no in-depth analysis of the intangible meaning of World Heritage (WH) cultural attraction types from the visitor’s lens. This study employed text mining and a Brand Personality (BP) lexical approach using WH personality categories to identify types of cultural attractions with intangible meanings in WHSs located in seven countries in Asia and the Pacific and Europe. This enabled the WH personality category distribution for each type of WH cultural attraction found on TripAdvisor to be measured. Accordingly, 9,971 visitor-generated reviews were analyzed and fifteen WHS cultural attraction types in the seven countries identified. The relationships between WH personality categories, the seven countries and WH attraction types were analyzed, and attraction types clustered into four groups. Significant differences were found between Asia and the Pacific and Europe regarding WH personality category distribution.
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