Serbian Adaptation of the Brand Personality Scale (Bps): an Application to Tourism Destinations

Abstract

The main aim of this research was to validate a Serbian adaptation of the Brand Personality Scale (BPS: Aaker, 1997) while applying it to tourist destinations. The BPS was developed as a measure of five personality traits of any kind of brand: Sincerity, Excitement, Competence, Sophistication, and Ruggedness. In the first study that was carried out on 192 (76% female) tourists from student population, exploratory factor analysis of the BPS resulted in a four-factor structure: Competence, Excitement, Sophistication, and Sincerity. The factor Ruggedness was not extracted in this study. In the second study that was carried out on 490 (56% females)tourists from general population, the confirmatory factor analysis was applied in order to validate the four-factor solution from the first study. Results indicated that this solution, with certain allocations and reductions of items, reached a satisfactory fit. The factors Excitement and Sincerity mainly matched the same factors from the original Aaker's model, while the factors Competence and Sophistication had somewhat different structure. The factor Excitement represented destination as vibrant, energetic, and youthful, while the factor Sincerity represented destination as honest, warm, and welcome. The factor Competence represented a successful and technically modern destination. It retained only two items from the original model (technical and leader), but the rest of items captured the same aspect of destination, such as contemporary and glamorous destination in which upper class status were featured. The factor Sophistication also retained only two items from the original model (feminine and good-looking), which were related to physical attractiveness and appearance, but the rest of the items captured skilled and industrious desti-2 This research was supported by the Ministry of Education, Science, and Technological Development of Republic of Serbia (Grant No.176020 nation. It seems that sophisticated destinations are those that strongly rely on physical appearance to achieve success. It could be concluded that there is a cultural specificity in describing the tourist destinations.Keywords: Brand Personality Scale, tourist destination personality, Serbian tourists, factor validity, reliability primenjena psihologija, str. 37-61 SERBIAN ADAPTATION OF THE BRAND PERSONALITY SCALE (BPS) 39People are prone to assign human personality traits to inanimate objects (Aaker, 1996;Solomon, 1999). Anthropomorphism is present in everyday life, culture, and religion (Barrett & Keil, 1996;Guthrie, 1997). It is so pervasive because humans are not comfortable with what is non-human (Guthrie, 1997). Seeing everything through familiar, humanlike characteristics, comforts people and attenuates their fears of the unknown and unpredictable. People have extensive knowledge about themselves, and therefore it is reasonable to use themselves as models for interpreting the external non-material world (Guthrie, 1997).In this study, the focus is on anthropomorphism of the brand, specifically o...

Development and validation of a new measure of travel destination personality

“…Even though the original model of brand personality indicated that five dimensions are independent and uncorrelated (Aaker's, 1997), previous results showed that these dimensions are related (Jovanović, 2014;Jovanović et al, 2017;Murphy et al, 2009). In the final DPS model, correlations between dimensions are low to moderate, indicating that although some dimensions shared similarities, the distinction between them could be made.…”

“…In the BPS, Ruggedness destination trait is described as rugged, tough, masculine, western, and outdoorsy. Ruggedness from BPS was shown to be inadequate in describing the personality of a travel destination in a previous study (Jovanović, 2014;Jovanović et al, 2017;Papadimitrou et al, 2014;Usakli & Baloglu, 2011). For example, items rugged, tough, and western are difficult to associate with a travel destination (Jovanović, 2014;Jovanović et al, 2017).…”

“…The decision about the number of components was based on parallel analysis (O'Connor, 2000). Promax rotation was applied because that we expected the extracted components to be correlated (Jovanović et al, 2017). Before conducting the analysis, 19 out of 75 adjectives were excluded from the instrument because they had more than 5% of "not clear" answers (brave, subtle, confident, hardworking, raw, consistent, caring, resourceful, courageous, sophisticated, cuddly, fair, sincere, capable, loyal, determined, competent, meek, direct).…”

“…But, even Aaker (1997) emphasizes that BPS might not be appropriate for measuring brand personality in a different cultural context. So, in its original form, BPS is not applicable to travel destinations and is sensitive to the culture from which the tourist originates (Jovanović 2014;Jovanović et al, 2017). Also, in order to avoid measuring brand identity instead of brand personality (Azoulay & Kapferer, 2003), the authors were careful to use only the items that are personality traits.…”

“…Besides these main issues, there is one more which includes the applicability of BPS items in specific cultures. For example, Jovanović (2014) and Jovanović et al (2017) concluded that some of the brand personality items change their meaning when translated into Serbian. For example, item western was originally part of the dimension Ruggedness (Aaker, 1997), but when translated into Serbian, this item obtains a different connotation and is more adequate to describe the Competence dimension.…”