A Cross-cultural Analysis of Brand Personality: Comparisons of China’s and the US Energy Companies’ English Websites

Abstract

Abstract-With the rapid development of economic globalization, projecting a positive image overseas and creating world famous brands have become vital to enhance industrial and national core competencies and execute the "Going out" strategy. To achieve the goals, corporates attach significance to establish and maintain corporate websites in view of its convenience, autonomy and interactivity while encountering cross-cultural challenges. This study employs corpus analytical tools to conduct content analysis on the existing cross-cultural differences and the linguistic and cultural features, between Chinese and US energy companies' websites based on Aaker's brand personality framework and Hofstede's cultural dimension theory. Findings reveal that there is a significant difference between occurrence frequencies of brand personality dimensions between China and US, and their websites linguistic discrepancies are relevant to their cultural differences. The study may provide meaningful implications on employing linguistic theories and methods to conduct multidisciplinary studies on corporate communication online.