Branding places: applying brand personality concept to cities

Abstract

PurposeIn recent years, brand personality as a branding construct has received considerable interest, which has led to a significant effort to develop tools to measure the personality of brands. Although the majority of these studies have focused on the brand personality of conventional product brands, the new boundaries of marketing obviously necessitate the application of branding constructs to non‐traditional products such as places. This study aims to focus on brand personalities of places, and to examine the applicability of this concept for city brands.Design/methodology/approachThe research employs a factor analysis method based on data collected from 898 college students.FindingsThe findings of the study reveal that differentiating places with regard to their brand personalities is achievable. The paper introduces two new dimensions of brand personality for cities.Originality/valueThe extraction of two new factors that contribute to place brand personalities is considered a major contribution of this research to the marketing literature.

City Brand Personality Projected by Municipalities from Central and Eastern Europe Countries—A Comparison of Facebook Usage

“…Due to the fact that people, capital, and knowledge are increasingly less related to the location, the development of places as brands helps to foster an environment capable of attracting new forms of activity and key groups [32]. The development of a place brand refers to the implementation of appropriate marketing strategies that allow places (also cities) to differentiate themselves from the competition through appropriate positioning of their resources/competencies of an economic, social, political, or cultural nature [33].…”

“…Due to the growing popularity of the place brand concept, which has really grown within the last two decades (both among academics and practitioners), some authors have already attempted to adapt the brand personality concept into the context of branding territories: tourism destinations [58], cities [33,[72][73][74], regions [75], and countries [76].…”

The role of destination personality fit in destination branding: Antecedents and outcomes

“…The current investigation contributes to this gap by testing how destination personality fit moderates the relationship between perceived destination personality and destination attitude. Finally, the research also contributes to the literature on antecedents to destination personality by shining light on how awareness of marketer-controlled tools such as destination advertising influences perceptions of destination personality and destination personality fit, thus effectively responding to calls for research on this matter (e.g., Demirbag et al, 2010). Figure 1 presents the study's conceptual model.…”

“…Notwithstanding the body of existing literature, research is scarce with regards to the effects of positive or negative coalignment between the destination brand managers' visions vis-à-vis the consumers' actual perception of the destination as a brand. Calls for future research in the area have also highlighted the need to study the effect of branding activities such as marketing communications on brand personality construction (Demirbag, Yurt, Guneri, & Kurtulus, 2010;Geuens, Weijters, & De Wulf, 2009). In response to the identified gaps and future research calls, the aim of the current study is to investigate drivers and outcomes of, not only destination personality, but also that of fit between envisioned destination personality from destination brand managers' perspectives and consumers' perceptions.…”

Exciting on Facebook or competent in the newspaper? Media effects on consumers’ perceptions of brands in the fashion category

“…Analogous to the five-factor human personality structure (e.g., Goldberg 1990), the scale consists of five brand personality dimensions, namely, sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, and ruggedness. To date, researchers adopted brand personality dimensions to study diverse topics such as brand extensions (Diamantopoulos, Smith, and Grime 2005), destination branding (Demirbag et al 2010), celebrity endorsements (Malodia et al 2017), employer branding (Rampl and Kenning 2014), brand trust (Sung and Kim 2010), and consumers' product evaluations (Freling and Forbes 2005).…”