Cross-cultural impact on financial companies’ online brand personality

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate Chinese and American financial companies’ distinct brand personality indicators shown through culturally based linguistic features online. The potential correlation between culturally oriented brand personalities and companies’ financial performance is also examined. Design/methodology/approach This study employs computerized content analyses to examine the cross-cultural differences among 28 American and Chinese financial companies’ online communication based on Aaker’s brand personality framework. Findings The findings reveal that despite some similarities, there are significant differences between the frequencies and patterns of brand personality indicators on American and Chinese websites, which demonstrate the connection between the companies’ linguistic preferences with their different cultural backgrounds. It also proves that there could be significant relationship between financial companies’ corporate brand (CB) personality expressions and their financial performance, and US financial companies’ revenues are more closely correlated with brand personality dimensions than Chinese companies’. Practical implications The necessity for cross-cultural adaptation of CB personality is verified in this study. Chinese international companies may have a big room to improve their online corporate communication. Similarly, foreign companies who intend to enter into Chinese market may think about laying emphasis on their personality indicators of competence in their online corporate communication. Originality/value This research is among the first to utilize a corpus-based analytical tool to conduct content analyses of financial companies’ online brand personalities, in addition to empirically validate the correlations between companies’ brand personality indicators and financial performance. The study enriches the literature on online marketing communication, draws attention to the connection between cultural differences and linguistic preferences in CB personality construction and emphasizes the importance of making appropriate cross-cultural adaptation in online corporate communication.

Consumers’ brand personality perceptions in a digital world: A systematic literature review and research agenda

“…In terms of research contexts, the review has revealed that studies on digital BP have been carried out across a wide range of industries and brands (see Appendix ), whereby product brands (Aguirre‐Rodriguez et al., 2015), digital‐native brands and e‐stores (Poddar et al., 2009), service brands (Shi & Shan, 2019), and tourism/destination brands (Borges‐Tiago et al., 2021) were most dominant. While BP has traditionally been more strongly associated with consumer product brands (Saeed et al., 2021), the dominant presence of non‐physical brands was somewhat surprising, yet this may be explained by the fact that in a digital world, all (types of) brands require a strong digital presence and may opt to position their brand using humanlike attributes to engage consumers at different digital channels.…”

“…On the other hand, the large volume of empirical studies has provided strong evidence that digital BP affects consumer behavior. On a final note, the body of literature is also dominated by cross‐sectional studies that mainly stem from a single cultural context (for exceptions, see Ha, 2016; Shi & Shan, 2019), which may restrict the generalizability of the research findings (Table 7).…”

Website words matter: an analysis of business schools' online brand personalities

“…A goal of this research was to replicate the work of Opoku et al (2006) who created a content analysis dictionary to determine if words representing Aaker's (1997) dimensions of brand personality could be used to differentiate university business school websites in South Africa, and later in Sweden and the US (Opoku et al, 2006(Opoku et al, , 2008(Opoku et al, , 2009. This methodology has been used to examine the online brand personality of five different political parties in England (Rutter et al, 2015), 28 American and Chinese financial companies (Shi and Shan, 2019), eight online brand communities (Paschen et al, 2017), and 12 European tourist destinations (Vinyals-Mirabent et al, 2019) as a few examples.…”

The impact of the metacognitive and behavioral factors of cultural intelligence on foreign brand acceptance

“…In the case of the motivational factor, there was analytically notable distinction in the results in the male sex. The motivational aspect of cultural intelligence represents the desire of an individual to contact people from different cultures (Shi & Shan, 2019). The statistically significant change in the results of this factor between the sexes can be explained by gender differences.…”