City brands projected personality: a new measure to assess the consistency of projected personality across messages

Abstract

Building a strong and consistent brand personality is crucial to position cities in the global context and a key element to influence potential visitors’ behavior. City brands’ communication endeavors to project consistent messages to position a unique personality in consumer’s mind. However, the variety of target groups that cities aim to attract and the number of stakeholders contributing with their messages to create the city brand makes it more difficult to uphold a single consistent proposition. Thus, brand managers require resources to coordinate and assess the consistency of the city’s personality projected through various sources of information. This study proposes a more accurate measure to assess the city brand projected personality [CBPP] on the websites. It extends the methodological approach proposed by Pitt et al. (2007) by considering two additional variables: the prevalence of the personality traits within the discourse and their link to the brand name. Furthermore, the study tests the CBPP measure to identify the consistency of Barcelona’s projected personality through two different stakeholders’ websites. The empirical study shows the capability of the measures introduced to assess more accurately the personality projected through several sources. The CBPP approach offers managerial implications by which marketers can assess more accurately the projected personality and more easily assess the consistency between different official messages.