The brand personality dimensions of business-to-business firms: a content analysis of employer reviews on social media

Abstract

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the brand personalities that employees are creating of their employer brands, in particular business-to-business (B-to-B) brands, when describing these brands on social media. We examine how the brand personalities, based on written online reviews, differ between high-and low-ranked, and high-and low-rated brands. Methodology/Approach: 6,300 written employee reviews from a social media platform, Glassdoor, are used for content analysis in DICTION, to determine the brand personality dimensions they communicate (J. L). An independent B-to-B brand ranking data source, Brandwatch, is used as a reference to various brands' level of ranking, while an ANOVA test is used to determine whether there is a difference in the brand personality trait means when comparing high and lowranked, and high-and low-rated brands. Findings: Our findings suggest that a strong social media presence does not equate to a strong employer brand personality perception among employees, since there are no significant differences between B-to-B firms based on their rankings. Research Implications: Extant literature has mostly explored the impact of either critical reviews or favourable customer ratings and reviews on company performance, with very little research focusing on the B-to-B context. In addition, research employing DICTION for the purposes of content analysis of reviews is sparse. The methodology used in this study could thus be employed to further compare and contrast the reviews from a single company, dividing top and low starred reviews to compare discrepancies. Practical Implications: The results of this study show how online shared employee experiences of employer brands contribute to the formation of a distinct employer brand personality. From a managerial viewpoint, engaging with current and past employees and being cognizant of the online narratives that they share on social media, may be an early indicator of where the firm is lacking (or showing strength) in its' employee engagement. This would offer a way for firms to both understand their employer brand personality as well as gauge how they compare to top employers in a specific sector or industry. Originality/Value/Contribution: The study attempts to grow the literature of employee brand engagement in a B-to-B context, by recognizing the important role that employees play in engaging with their employer brand online. Two main contributions are offered. The first contribution relates to the finding that employees perceive highly-rated B-to-B brands as being more competent, exciting, sincere and sophisticated than low-rated B-to-B brands. Second, the methodology used in this study proves to be a novel and accurate way of comparing employee reviews and perceived employer brand personality, with the employer-created intended brand image.

Employer Ratings through Crowdsourcing on Social Media: An Examination of U.S. Fortune 500 Companies

“…As mentioned, the different employer rating scales reflect different facets of EVP. Although all EVP facets are promising, these different types of EVP do not matter to the same extent for internal employees [35]. In other words, different specific employer ratings (culture and values, work-life balance, senior management, compensation and benefits, career opportunity, CEO endorsement, and business outlook) have different weights in predicting or explaining the overall employer rating, which, in turn, allows employers to rank them in order of importance and priority; otherwise, employers may suffer from waste of resources on noncritical EVP facets [13].…”

Online Employer Reviews as a Data Source: A Systematic Literature Review

“…They demonstrated that top-ranked (vs. low ranked) employers are perceived as less exciting, rugged, and sincere. Furthermore, high (vs. low) rated (one vs. five stars) reviews displayed more competence, excitement, sincerity, sophistication, but less ruggedness [36].…”

“…They showed that lower ratings increase audit fees, audit report lag length, and firms' likelihood of receiving modified going concern opinions [20]. Third, Robertson et al compared brand personality perceptions between reviews of highly and lowly ranked firms according to Brandwatch's B2Branking and between highly and lowly rated reviews (according to reviews' overall rating) [36]. They demonstrated that top-ranked (vs. low ranked) employers are perceived as less exciting, rugged, and sincere.…”

“…Second, five studies utilized dictionary-based text analysis to extract information from the reviews' textual content. More specifically, three studies applied DICTION [33,34,36]. DICTION is a text analysis program developed by communication researchers to identify text dimensions based on their word frequency [40].…”

“…Further, Pitt et al extracted these five dimensions and four further dimensions: insistence, embellishment, variety, and complexity [34]. In comparison, Robertson et al utilized DICTION's capability to estimate the word frequencies of dimension in userdefined content dictionaries and extracted Aaker's five dimensions of brand personality [36]: sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, and ruggedness [1]. Duncan et al used another widely used text analysis program to determine word frequency counts of various dimensions based on predefined or user-defined content dictionaries [12]: LIWC [Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count; 45].…”