Understanding the Incongruent Brand Personalities on Social Media: Evidence from Indian Brands

Abstract

Although the social media websites decreased the firms’ control over their brand personalities, there is little research on the incongruence between communicated and perceived brand personality of Indian service brands. The impact of bots and suspicious accounts on the online brand personalities also remained unexplored. We analyzed 58,024 tweets of nine Indian service brands using machine learning. Some of the newer brands are savvier in managing their brand personalities. The public sector brands have poorer alignment between communicated and perceived brand personalities. A counterintuitive finding is that the brand sentiment changes in value, but not in category, after removing the suspicious accounts.