The Brand Personality Effect: Communicating Brand Personality on Twitter and its Influence on Online Community Engagement

Abstract

The use of new technology by the consumer market greatly shapes the marketing strategies being used by companies to engage their consumers. Among these new technologies is the use of social media in reaching out to the organization’s audience online. One of the most popular social media to date is the microblogging platform of Twitter. With 500 million tweets, on the average, sent per day, the microblogging platform is definitely a rich source of data for researchers and a lucrative marketing medium for companies. Nonetheless, one of the challenges for companies in developing an effective Twitter strategy is the lack of theoretical or empirical evidence on the proper use of Twitter. While there has been a number of studies on why individuals use Twitter (Honeycutt & Herring, 2009; Java, Song, Finin, & Tseng, 2007), there are a number of studies on the use of Twitter by organizations but most of these are published in conference proceedings. Thus, despite its potential importance for a firm’s external communications, there is very little research evidence to guide managers in developing a successful campaign for the organizational use of Twitter (Burton & Soboleva, 2011). The current study aims to provide empirical evidence on how firms can utilize Twitter effectively in their marketing communications using the association between brand personality and brand engagement that several branding researchers propose (J. Aaker, 1997; Geuens, Weijters, & Wulf, 2009; Grisaffe & Nguyen, 2011; Maehle, Otnes, & Supphellen, 2011) The study extends Aaker’s previous empirical work on brand personality by applying the Brand Personality Scale in exploring whether Twitter brand communities convey distinctive brand personalities online and its influence on the communities’ level or intensity of consumer engagement and sentiment quality. Moreover, the moderating effect of the product involvement construct in consumer engagement is also measured. By collecting data for a period of eight weeks using the publicly available Twitter application programming interface (API) from 23 accounts of Twitter-verified business-to-consumer (B2C) brands, the researcher analyzes the validity of the paper’s hypothesis by using computerized content analysis and opinion mining. The paper is the first to compare Twitter marketing across organizations using the brand personality concept. It demonstrates a potential basis for Twitter strategies and discusses the benefits of these strategies thus providing a framework of analysis for Twitter practice and strategic direction for companies developing their utilization of Twitter to communicate with their followers on the social media. The specific research objectives of this study are as follows; first, to examine the applicability of brand personality dimensions used in marketing research to online brand communities on Twitter. Second, to establish a connection between the congruence of offline and online brand personalities in building a successful social media brand community. Third, we test the moderating effect of product involvement in the effect of brand personality on brand community engagement. Lastly, this study investigates the sentiment quality of consumer messages to the firms which succeed in communicating their brands’ personalities on Twitter.