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Perceived
Multiple identities of a festival brand
Intended, communicated and perceived brand personality
personality in the social media environment
Barbara Masiello, Enrico Bonetti and Francesco Izzo 749
Department of Economics, University of Campania “L. Vanvitelli”, Capua, Italy
Received 23 November 2018
Revised 30 May 2019
26 September 2019
Abstract 18 November 2019
Purpose – This paper aims to understand how festival brand personality is built and managed in the social Accepted 22 December 2019
media environment by explaining the intended (by the organizers) festival brand personality and how this
concept is communicated and perceived by social media users.
Design/methodology/approach – A multi-method research design was used. Initially, a qualitative
analysis based on the free-listing psychological meaning approach was adopted. Then, a content analysis of
23,717 Facebook posts and tweets was performed through NVivo11. Finally, the resulting data were
examined through a non-parametric statistical analysis.
Findings – The results show an “internal brand personality gap” (between the intended and
communicated brand personality) and an “external brand personality gap” (between the
communicated and perceived brand personality). The findings also highlight the existence of an
“ultimate brand personality on social media,” which represents a collective and dynamic construct
that is co-created by the organization and its customers through interaction and the key role of the
customers’ experiences.
Research limitations/implications – The findings contribute to a theory of event brand personality
and its management on social media by showing a case with multiple identities.
Practical implications – Implications for the organizers of festivals and non-sport events are discussed
to reduce internal and external gaps and better understand the “fit/unfit problem” when dealing with brand
personality on social media.
Originality/value – This paper contributes to a research area that is in its infancy because it is one of the
first attempts to analyze festival brand personality and its relationship with social media.
Keywords Social media, Festivals, Content analysis, Web 2.0, Events, Brand personality
Paper type Research paper

Introduction
The spread of social media has dramatically changed the way customers engage with a
brand. Organizations have to rethink the way they interact and communicate with their
customers as a consequence of the different roles that customers play in the communication
process (Van Dijck, 2009). Therefore, organizations must consider opportunities and risks
connected with the use of social media. Scholars have also encouraged more research to
understand the role of social media in the context of tourism (Pasanen and Konu, 2016). In
particular, festivals represent a promising empirical setting for investigating new media and
social media usage (Hudson et al., 2015; MacKay et al., 2017) and the impact on branding
strategies. A festival is a “collective experience” where an attendee can be highly influenced International Journal of
by other attendees, and social media is an important vehicle of influence (Schivinski et al., Contemporary Hospitality
Management
2019) and a perfect environment for translating shared experience in the co-creation of brand Vol. 32 No. 2, 2020
pp. 749-768
personality meanings (Gymothy and Larson, 2015). Brand personality is a set of human-like © Emerald Publishing Limited
0959-6119
characteristics that is assigned or embedded within a brand (Aaker, 1997). For a festival, it DOI 10.1108/IJCHM-11-2018-0937
IJCHM can be described as the way an organization expresses the event’s emotional positioning but
32,2 also the (human) personality traits that customers perceive an event to possess.
Recently, Ranfagni et al. (2016) called for more research regarding the differences
between the brand personality intended by organizers and that perceived by customers. In
the event setting, research on brand personality is still in its infancy (Walsh et al., 2013),
and the few studies on this topic are almost exclusively related to sporting events. In
750 addition, the relationship between social media and event branding is nearly unexplored
(Moro and Rita, 2018).
By focusing on the brand personality of one of the most important comics festivals in
Europe (Comicon, which has been held in Naples, Italy, since 1998), the goal of this paper
was to understand how festival brand personality is built and managed in the social media
environment and how it is perceived by social media users.
Research findings show the existence of an “internal” and an “external” brand
personality gap as well as an “ultimate brand personality” co-created by event organizers
and customers. These findings also suggest how event managers could intervene to prevent
or treat “multiple identity syndrome” in the social media environment.
The paper is structured as follows. First, the relationship between brand personality and
event branding is described. Then, the potential gaps generated by a misalignment between
intended, communicated and perceived brand personality are introduced. Next, the
methodology used to identify and measure communication gaps in a festival context is
presented. The results are described in the next section and measures the misalignments
between intended and communicated and between communicated and perceived brand
personality. The discussion section describes the implications of these misalignments
and introduces the “ultimate brand personality” concept. Finally, the contribution to theory
and implications for practice are highlighted together with the directions for future research
and the limitations of the study.

Brand personality and event branding

Event branding has become an interesting study topic (Park and Park, 2017), but a model for
event brand creation is still needed (Parent and Séguin, 2008).
The existing research can be divided into two streams and both are almost always
limited to major sporting events: the first is focused on branding in terms of event
associations and image (Hallmann et al., 2010; Kaplanidou, 2010; Papadimitriou et al., 2016),
whereas the second stream explores the links between the brand of the event and associated
concepts such as sponsorship, licensing or destination image (Hallmann and Breuer, 2010).
As observed in Parent and Séguin (2008), a great deal is known about the process,
management and outcomes of a brand, while the core building blocks or components of an
event brand have not been identified in the literature. To describe brand identity and brand
meaning, the construct of brand personality has emerged as a key reference in both the
academic literature (Aaker, 1997; Grohmann, 2009) and in managerial practice (Court et al.,
1997; Aufreiter et al., 2003).
Brand personality “refers to the set of human characteristics associated with a brand”
(Aaker, 1997, p. 347) and combines physical and functional attributes with inner features of
brands that are expressed as personality traits (Batra et al., 1993; Keller, 1993). These traits
are connected to one of five dimensions:
(1) sincerity (i.e., being down-to-earth, honest, wholesome and cheerful);
(2) excitement (daring, spirited, imaginative and up-to-date);
(3) competence (reliable, intelligent and successful);
 (4) sophistication (charming and upper class); and Perceived
(5) ruggedness (tough and outdoorsy). brand
personality
Aaker’s brand personality scale (BPS), which is a framework used to capture the key
dimensions of brand personality, is proposed as a standard to measure brand personality
and has been widely applied to understand the brand image of organizations and its effects
on consumer behavior (Kim et al., 2001; Venable et al., 2003). Nevertheless, only a few studies
have applied Aaker’s construct to events and its application is almost exclusively related to
751
sporting events. Lee and Cho (2009) identified five dimensions of sporting event personality
(diligence, uninhibitedness, fit, tradition and amusement); Cáslavová and Petrácková (2011)
applied the BPS to large-scale sporting events to describe the brands and present
suggestions to improve brand value; Braunstein and Ross (2010) re-examined and
challenged the models used to operationalize Aaker’s BPS and proposed an updated
framework to adopt within a sporting context; and Bang et al. (2014) used BPS to examine
the relationship between event brand and volunteers’ intentions to volunteer again.
Consequently, there is a lack of studies applying such constructs to festivals or non-
sporting events (despite their importance) so that some authors, in addressing issues of
event branding, prefer to borrow concepts from destination branding studies rather than
refer to a stream of research still in its infancy (Esu and Arrey, 2009).

Brand personality, social media and communication gaps

In marketing practice, many managers carefully define brand personality and often invest
extensive resources into brand-related marketing activities to reach consistency between
perceived and intended brand personality (Burnett and Hutton, 2007). However, customers’
perceptions of brand personality do not necessarily coincide with those intended by the
organization. This has been referred to as the case of “two different faces of brand
personality” (Plummer, 1985, p. 28).
Scholars agree with the assumption that brand identity strategy forms the basis of an
organization’s overall marketing communication strategy. By clearly communicating brand
identity, the brand strategist can ensure more effective marketing communication. An ideal
outcome of such a strategy would be a consumer-perceived brand personality that is
consistent with the strategists’ intended brand personality (Madhavaram et al., 2005).
However, today’s brands are no longer considered controllable knowledge structures,
and customers are not considered passive absorbers of brand knowledge. A brand is a
“repository of meanings for customers to use in living their own lives” (Allen et al., 2008,
p. 782) and such meanings are the result of a collective and co-creational process involving
several players including individual customers, customer groups, organizations and cultural
intermediaries (Payne et al., 2009). The diffusion of social media, together with the increased
possibilities of large-scale consumer-to-consumer interaction and easier user generation of
content, highlights the importance of identifying and managing the multi-vocal nature of
brand authorship (Gensler et al., 2013). Among the players who contribute to defining a
brand identity, consumers are those who are more empowered by social media as confirmed
by the growing attention paid in the literature to issues related to consumer brand
engagement in social media (Singh and Sonnenburg, 2012; Hollebeek et al., 2014) and to the
relationships between the brand and the consumer (Labrecque, 2014).
In essence, the perceived brand personality is the result of a process of subjective
interpretation in which the customer filters the traits of the personality defined by the
organization for the brand, interprets them (Ivens and Valta, 2012) and even enriches them
with elements not intended or planned by the management (Cayla and Arnould, 2008).
IJCHM Consequently, it is extremely important for brand managers to know if there is a
32,2 misalignment between intended and perceived brand personality. According to Ranfagni
et al. (2016, p. 71), because of this risk:
[. . .]it is essential to determine how alignment between company-defined and consumer-perceived
brand personality can be measured and evaluated. An analysis of the scientific literature on brand
personality has revealed a research gap in this area.
752 Although several studies have contributed to the explanation of the construct of brand
personality and its relationship with customers, very scant research has been conducted to
compare, measure and evaluate the fit between intended and perceived brand personality
(Malär et al., 2012).
The present study’s general research framework is adopted from the basic
communication model (Lasswell, 1948; Katz, 1957) that represents the communication chain
from the sender to the receiver (Figure 1). The basic idea is that the organization (as the
sender) defines an intended brand personality and then encodes this “ideal identity” into
specific communications (communicated brand personality), which are received, decoded and
interpreted by the customer and thus generate a perceived brand personality that is stored in
the customer’s memory (Anderson, 1990).
Therefore, the communication strategy could be unsuccessful if the intended brand
identity is not effectively translated into the communication activities implemented by the
organization (the communicated brand identity) or if the latter is interpreted in a distorted
manner by the recipient of the message. It is possible to distinguish internal brand
personality gap (between intended and communicated brand personality) from external
brand personality gap (between communicated and perceived brand personality) (Figure 1).
The analysis of these gaps is complex because the understanding of customer
perceptions about a brand is becoming increasingly difficult. Consumer power has
significantly grown because of the diffusion of social media; these empowered consumers
use social media to share their experiences with products and brands, rely on greater
reaction speed and address a larger audience than that of the organization receiving their
comments (Labrecque et al., 2013). In addition, brand meanings can be enriched and
reshaped by customers through electronic word-of-mouth (Duan et al., 2008; Chintagunta
et al., 2010; Sun, 2012) and within brand communities where customers connect via the
brand’s linking value to collectively consume and negotiate brand meanings (Cova, 1997;
Muñiz and O’Guinn, 2001; McAlexander et al., 2002).
Fournier and Avery (2011) refer to “open-source” branding to represent a brand identity
generation process that is nourished by several players and is amplified by social media.
Consistent with this perspective, Hennig-Thurau et al. (2013) state that brand management
is similar to playing pinball: the organization, which defines an intended brand identity, can
manipulate the ball but it cannot predict its exact trajectory and this is how the brand

Internal External
Brand Brand
Organization Personality Personality Customer
Gap Communication Gap
activities to
Intended Brand Perceived Brand
Figure 1. Personality Encoding transmit message Decoding
Personality
Brand personality
gaps in the
communication
model Unfit
identity evolves. Thus, the organization can only try to limit the possible paths for the ball Perceived
and provide boundaries and constraints for its trajectory. brand
personality
Event brand personality communication gaps
Understanding the customers’ perspective appears to be even more relevant for events and
festivals where their participation in the definition of the brand meanings can only be amplified.
This is because when these events are organized to pursue destination marketing goals, they 753
should be demand side driven and managed through a bottom-up approach (Van Niekerk, 2017).
Nevertheless, even if the literature on social media and events or festivals is now quite
rich, it almost exclusively focuses on the issues related to electronic word-of-mouth (Hudson
et al., 2015), the role of social media throughout the customer journey (Gymothy and Larson,
2015; MacKay et al., 2017) and the use of social media as a marketing communication tool for
events (Lee et al., 2012), whereas the relationship between social media and the event brand
is virtually unexplored. Even when adopting a broader perspective (i.e. the tourism
industry), the impact exerted by social media on brands remains a mostly uncovered topic
as recently underlined by several scholars (Oliveira and Panyik, 2015; Moro and Rita, 2018).
Methods to measure event brand personality are mainly focused on sporting events.
Heere (2010), by analyzing netball clubs in New Zealand, highlighted several limitations of
the Aaker’s BPS scale and pointed out that brand personality is not an intrinsic feature but
is mainly the result of the marketing efforts of the company. Moreover, Heere suggested a
model for brand personality where managers should first create a list of salient adjectives to
describe the brand and then test such adjectives with customers to measure how the latter
perceives the brand. The value of this model resides not only in the identification of brand
personality but also in its ability to highlight the gap between brand personality intended by
managers and that perceived by customers. Walsh et al. (2013) used Heere’s method to
examine the differences in the brand personality items of National College Athletic
Association event among the users and non-users of the event’s Facebook site. However, no
previous research on the differences between intended, communicated and perceived brand
personality on social media has been conducted in the non-sports event setting.

Methodology
To fill the research gaps that emerged from the literature review, the present study aimed at
understanding how festival brand personality is managed in the social media environment by
analyzing what was intended by its organizers, how it is communicated and how it is perceived
by social media users. More precisely, the first two research questions are as follows:

RQ1. Are there differences in the festival’s brand personality items between the
organizers’ intentions and what organizers communicate on social media?
RQ2. Are there differences in the festival’s brand personality items communicated by
the organizers and social media users’ perceptions?
Furthermore, an event is a time-sensitive product so that interactions between brands and
customers through social networks can have very different results depending on when they occur
(i.e. before, during or after the event). Therefore, the third research question is as follows:

RQ3. Are differences influenced by the time point of the event?

To answer to these research questions, the Comicon festival was considered, which is an
international comics festival that has been held every year since 1998 in Naples (Italy), as an
IJCHM instrumental single-case study (Stake, 1995) that can provide insights to advance and refine
32,2 theory about event brand personality on social media. Comicon is one of the largest and
most famous comics festivals in Europe and offers over 200 different exhibitions,
conferences, games, laboratories, children’s activities, readings, movies, performances and
contests. The festival has lasted for more than 20 years, and it represents a unit of analysis
consistent with the examination of brand personality (Aaker, 1997). In 2017, Comicon
754 attendance exceeded 130,000 over its four-day operation with an economic impact on the
hosting city evaluated at approximately e 13m. In the same year, Comicon used five
different social media platforms to provide information and engage with its customers:
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Flickr.
The empirical research presented in this paper is based on a multi-method approach,
which mixes both qualitative and quantitative analysis.
In the first step of the research, Heere’s method (Heere, 2010) was followed, and a
variation of the free-listing psychological meaning approach of Friedmann (1986) was used.
The study adopted this strategy to evaluate the concept that a brand does not possess an
“intrinsic” personality but rather that it is given by different stakeholders (organizers/
managers versus customers/users), and the research was also intended to examine the
differences between the two groups. To define brand personality items from the event
organization’s point of view, nine managers of the Comicon festival were asked to compile a
list of personality adjectives of the festival brand. The managers had the following
responsibilities: marketing, creativity, social media, operation, communication, editorial
coordination, music programming, exhibition and exhibitor relationships (their
demographic profiles are briefly described in the results section). By adopting the research
protocol set by Heere (2010, p. 20) and that was followed by a previous study (Walsh et al.,
2013, pp. 218-219), the following message was sent to these managers:
Brand personality theory is based on the idea that people attach human characteristics to a brand
to give meaning to the product. Managers anticipate on this notion by providing these human
characteristics to their product in their marketing strategies. You probably have your own set of
adjectives that you would like to have people associate with the Comicon festival. To examine
your brand more effectively among your fans, we would like you to share these adjectives with us.
Please think carefully about your choice of words and see this exercise as a way to position your
event on the market.
All communication was through e-mail and directly between authors and managers. Based
on the comparison of the responses received, 8 brand personality items were identified for
the festival. To avoid misunderstandings and ensure a unified interpretation regarding the
meaning attributed to each adjective, the list of adjectives was then sent back to each
manager together with a brief description of the meaning attributed to each adjective for
potential comments and approval. The final list included the following items:
 cultured (14 per cent);
 fantastic (6 per cent);
 funny (17 per cent);
 interacting (17 per cent);
 passionate (6 per cent);
 powerful (9 per cent);
 reliable (6 per cent); and
 various (25 per cent).
Table I shows what each item means with reference to the Comicon festival and also Perceived
provides some sample statements from social media (Table I also includes three additional brand
items – exciting, extraordinary and valuable – that “emerged” from the analysis of post/
tweets).
personality
In the second stage of research, social media users’ perceptions of the festival brand
personality were examined to verify whether and to what extent they differed from the
brand personality features proposed by organizers.
To achieve this goal, a content analysis of a census of tweets and Facebook posts of the 755
official festival account across a fixed period of time was performed: this time included one
week before, during and one week after the festival (MacKay et al., 2017). In December 2017,
Comicon had over 105,000 fans on Facebook and 7,000 followers on Twitter.
Data were collected through the Web browser extension “NCapture” and the Facebook
extension “Netvizz.” These data were first analyzed through the qualitative data analysis

Brand
personality item Description Sample statement

Cultured Comicon helps to spread the concept of Don’t miss the exhibition “Cyborg
comics as an artistic and cultural event Invasion” at the archaeological museum
that is set up in partnership with Comicon
Fantastic Comicon takes its visitors into a world of A special atmosphere. You are yourself
magic and imagination through fantasy and without labels or
stereotypes
Funny Comicon is an opportunity for recreation I walk through those gates into a world
and entertainment that amuses me and keeps me light-hearted
Interacting Comicon breaks down relational barriers Yesterday the beautiful Rachel Keller, who
and facilitates socialization among and plays Syd Barrett in “Legion,” met her
between visitors and their idols (actors, many Comiconian fans!
authors and artists)
Passionate Comicon allows visitors to cultivate and I’m a mother of a family and a
share their passions in an engaging way professional, but now there’s Comicon!!!
Powerful Comicon is a high-impact experience that We are a trending topic on Twitter!
is full of hard-to-forget situations
Reliable Comicon is managed efficiently and Impeccable organization and I hope it
professionally improves even more even if it seems
impossible.
Various Comicon offers heterogeneous experiences True beauty lies in diversity and in the very
both in the hosted art forms (publishing, idea of imagination
cinema and television) and in the
organized initiatives (conferences,
meetings, shopping, premieres and
games)
Exciting Comicon creates great expectations, Always tears on the last day!!
impatience, enthusiasm and strong
feelings
Extraordinary Comicon offers the opportunity to live Exactly one month after the official release
unique and out-of-the-ordinary of the movie “Wonder Woman,” Comicon
experiences hosts an incredible parade with
horsebacked amazons led by a cosplayer of
Diana Prince on May 1! Table I.
Valuable Comicon is a great deal if one compares its The price, for guests and events, is more Brand personality
price with what it offers than fair description of items
IJCHM software NVivo 11 and second through a quantitative analysis. A total of 3,200 tweets and
32,2 20,517 posts were captured for a total N = 23,717.
NVivo is a qualitative research software that is used to classify, group and organize the
data, which helps in enhancing the rigor of the data analysis and in reducing errors in the
dissemination of data in the manual analysis (Crowley et al., 2002). NVivo enables
researchers to categorize data by using “nodes” and “cases.” Nodes represent the topics
756 found in the source material and can also be organized in a hierarchical mode by using
“parent” and “child” nodes. Cases represent “units of observation,” which might include
people, places, sites or organizations.
Posts and tweets were differentiated for three different cases according to their “source”:
“organization,” “user” and “other organizations” (sponsors and exhibitors).
Then, the organized nodes were coded in a hierarchical mode. Posts and tweets were
differentiated according to the social media platform (“Facebook” or “Twitter”) and also
based on the time point (“pre-,” “during-” and “post-festival”). Furthermore, the list of brand
personality items defined in the first step of the research was used to code the data together
with two more labels: “other” and “not classified.” “Other” was used to code brand
personality items identified by researchers through data analysis that was not ascribable to
the list of organizers’ brand personality items. “Not classified” was used for posts/tweets
that were not referred to as brand personality items, which were then excluded by
subsequent analysis.
Regarding the brand personality items, words or phrases were considered the same node
if they contained a similar reference followed by “like to like” logic (Bazeley and Jackson,
2013). Furthermore, the same word or phrase could be associated with more than one node.
To enhance the reliability of the results, two of the authors separately coded the content.
Afterward, the NVivo function “coding comparison” was used to run a comparison between
the coding results from the two researchers on two casual samples of 200 each. The results
show a greater than minimum acceptability with Cohen’s kappa ranging from k = 0.854 to
k = 0.968 (Bazeley and Jackson, 2013).
The third step of the research involved an in-depth analysis of gathered data by using the
query section of NVivo. The “matrix coding” query of NVivo was run to compare all of the
different cases and/or all of the different nodes to identify co-occurrences and associations
between them. The resulting matrix grids from NVivo were analyzed and showed overlaps
and patterns of gathered data, which made comparisons and examinations of the emerging
themes easier.
In the fourth and last step, a quantitative analysis was conducted to answer the research
questions. Hence, data analysis followed a sequential explorative strategy whereby
quantitative analysis aided the interpretation of the qualitative data (MacKay et al., 2017).
Non-parametric statistical procedures were used based on the nominal nature of the
variables and included the chi-square test and two-sample Kolmogorov–Smirnov test (Siegel
and Castellan, 1988).

Results
The preliminary results provide an overview of the demographic profile of the managers
interviewed: they worked at Comicon for at least 4 years up to a maximum of 21; 67 per cent
of them were male, and they ranged in age from 28 to 52.
To answer RQ1, the chi-square test was conducted to examine whether there were
significant differences between the brand personality items in the organizers’ intentions and
the brand personality items communicated by the organizers through Facebook and
Twitter.
 The null hypothesis was that the distribution of the observed variable, namely, the brand Perceived
personality items of the festival’s organizers resulting from the content analysis of Facebook brand
and Twitter, did not differ from the theoretical distribution of the variable, namely, the
brand personality items declared by the festival’s organizers in the first step of the research.
personality
The results (Table II) show that with 7 degrees of freedom, there were certain significant
differences at the 1 per cent level. Therefore, the statistical null hypothesis regarding the
non-difference between the two distributions is refused.
In particular, the relevance of the brand personality items “interacting” and “reliable” 757
was significantly higher in the communication on Facebook and Twitter made by the
festival’s organizers than their intentions. Instead, “funny,” “fantastic” and “various” are
attributes that were less relevant in the communication of the brand personality on social
media than they were in the organizers’ intentions.
In addition, the analysis of the data also showed that a number of posts/tweets from the
festival’s organizers (n = 60) in the parent node “brand personality items” were coded as
“other.” A further analysis of the gathered data made by two of the researchers through
NVivo showed that the node “others” could be classified in the following sub-nodes:
“exciting” (n = 24), “extraordinary” (n = 27), and “valuable” (n = 9). These were defined by
the researchers, as shown in Table I.
In other words, the organizers conveyed through social media some brand personality
items that they did not declare as attributes of their brand personality. After including the
“other” category, the results of the chi-square test were confirmed at the 1 per cent level (chi-
square = 200.458; df = 8; Asymp. Sig = 0.000).
For RQ2, the brand personality items communicated on social media by the festival’s
organizers were compared with those perceived by social media users. A two-sample
Kolmogorov–Smirnov test was performed to assess the probability of the differences in the
distribution of the organizers and users for the variables represented by all of the festival’s
brand personality items (Siegel and Castellan, 1988). The results (Table III) show that there
were significant differences for the items “cultured,” “funny,” “reliable,” “various” and
“others” (p < 0.01).
Therefore, there is a significant misalignment between the Comicon brand personality
communicated on social media by the organizers and the one perceived by the social media users.

Brand personality item Observed N. Expected N. Residual

1. Cultural 40 48.4 8.4

2. Fantastic 4 20.8 16.8
3. Funny 16 58.8 42.8
4. Interacting 112 58.8 53.2
5. Passionate 21 20.8 0.2
6. Powerful 24 31.1 7.1
7. Reliable 66 20.8 45.2
8. Various 63 86.5 23.5

Table II.
Total (N) 346
Test statistic Chi-square test
Chi-square 200.865 within – brand
df 7 personality items,
Asymp. Sig. 0.000 festival’s organizers
IJCHM In detail, the festival’s brand personality items “cultured,” “reliable,” and “various”
32,2 communicated by the organizers are significantly more relevant than they are from the
social media users’ perspective. Instead, the dimensions “funny” and “others” are
significantly greater in the festival’s brand personality perceived by social media users than
in the one communicated by the organizers. A further analysis of the data through the
matrix grid of the NVivo software showed that the “other” category for the users could be
758 classified in the following sub-nodes: “exciting” (n = 259), “enjoyable” (n = 81),
“extraordinary” (n = 74), “valuable” (n = 67) and “chaotic” (n = 52). Therefore, the brand
personality items perceived by the users also include two new attributes (“enjoyable,” which
was intended as pleasant, relaxing and delightful, and “Chaotic,” which was intended as
crowded, disorganized and confused) that are not present in the brand personality
communicated by the festival’s organizers on social media. A synthesis of the
misalignments between the intended and communicated and between the communicated
and perceived brand personality items is shown in Figure 2.
Next, RQ3 was examined to determine whether and to what extent the differences between
the festival’s communicated and perceived brand personality were contingent on the time point of
the event. In particular, the research assessed whether there were differences before and after the
conclusion of the event to obtain insights into whether the “experience” of the festival could affect
the results. Therefore, using the NVivo coding matrix, the brand personality items were
classified, both for organizers and for users, into two different groups corresponding to the period
“before/during the festival” and “after the conclusion of the festival.” Then, a two-sample
Kolmogorov–Smirnov test was performed again to assess the probability of the differences in the
distribution between organizers and users.
The results (Table IV) show that statistical differences in the distributions of the organizers
and users existed before the conclusion of the event for the items “cultured,” “funny,” “reliable,”
“others” (p < 0.01) and “various” (p < 0.05). However, when moving to the posts/tweets published
after the conclusion of the event, the results show that there was no statistical difference between
the distributions of the organizers and users except for the category “others” (p < 0.01). Therefore,
according to these results, the time point seems to be relevant in analyzing differences in brand
personality items. Moreover, the experience of participation in the event is an important theme to
consider when examining the alignment (or not) of communicated and perceived brand
personality and it will be discussed in detail in the following section.

Discussion
The results show the existence of multiple identities of the Comicon event, as the intended,
communicated and perceived brand personality in social media do not match. Thus,
different personality profiles of the Comicon brand emerge along with the consequent risks
associated with message inconsistency. However, the results also highlight important

Table III. Organizers vs users 1. Cul 2. Fant 3. Fun 4. Inter 5. Pas 6. Pow 7. Rel 8. Var 9. Oth
Two-sample
Most extreme differences
Kolmogorov–
Absolute 0.094 0.004 0.144 0.062 0.020 0.134 0.092 0.144 0.046
Smirnov test – brand Positive 0.094 0.004 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.134 0.092 0.000 0.046
personality on social Negative 0.000 0.000 0.144 0.062 0.020 0.000 0.000 0.144 0.000
media, festival’s Kolmogorov–Smirnov Z 1.714 0.079 2.624 0.830 1,125 0.358 2.439 1.672 2.627
organizers vs users P value (two-tailed) 0.006 1.000 0.000 0.496 0.159 1.000 0.000 0.007 0.000
 INTENDED VS COMMUNICATED VS PERCEIVED Perceived
COMMUNICATED
Overcommunicated items Overperceived items
brand
• Funny personality

Communicated Brand Personality

• Interacting • Exciting
Intended Brand Personality

• Reliable • Valuable
Properly communicated items Properly perceived items
• Passionate
• Cultured • Powerful 759
• Passionate • Interacting
• Powerful • Fantastic

Undercommunicated items Underperceived items

• Funny • Cultured Figure 2.

• Fantastic • Reliable
• Various • Various Misalignments
between intended,

Brand Personality
Uncommunicated
Unintended but

but perceived
communicated

communicated and
Personality

• Exciting • Enjoyable
perceived brand
Brand

• Extraordinary • Chaotic
• Valuable personality for
Comicon

Organizers vs users over time 1. Cul 2. Fant 3. Fun 4. Inter 5. Pas 6. Pow 7. Rel 8. Var 9. Oth

Before/during the event

Most extreme differences
Absolute 0.098 0.005 0.158 0.063 0.018 0.140 0.084 0.105 0.016
Positive 0.098 0.005 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.140 0.084 0.000 0.016
Negative 0.000 0.000 0.158 0.063 0.018 0.000 0.000 0.105 0.000
Kolmogorov–Smirnov Z 1.661 0.081 2.680 0.279 1.077 0.298 2.383 1.435 1.784 Table IV.
P value (two-tailed) 0.008 1.000 0.000 1.000 0.196 1.000 0.000 0.033 0.003 Two-sample
Kolmogorov–
After the event Smirnov test – brand
Most extreme differences
personality on SM,
Absolute 0.145 0.034 0.184 0.076 0.027 0.073 0.250 0.496 0.281
Positive 0.145 0.034 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.073 0.250 0.000 0.281 festival’s organizers
Negative 0.000 0.000 0.184 0.076 0.027 0.000 0.000 0.496 0.000 vs users, before/
Kolmogorov–Smirnov Z 0.614 0.144 0.781 1.194 0.321 0.115 0.310 1.062 2.107 during and after the
P value (two-tailed) 0.845 1.000 0.576 0.115 1.000 1.000 1.000 0.209 0.000 event

opportunities related to the co-creational role played by the social media users and it is
discussed below.

Intended personality vs communicated personality: the internal brand personality gap

The analysis primarily unveils the existence of an “internal brand personality gap” between
Comicon brand personality items that managers would aim to convey to the customers and
the festival brand personality items that they actually convey through social media.
According to the results, Comicon organizers should increase the emphasis on the items
“funny,” “fantastic” and “various,” as they are intended brand personality traits that find
little relevance in current social media communication. Instead, the communicated festival
IJCHM brand personality accentuates some traits too much, such as “interactive” and “reliable,” in
32,2 comparison with the organizers’ intentions and it even embodies traits of brand personality
that were not intended at all by the organizers (e.g. “exciting,” “extraordinary” and
“valuable”).
Such misalignment reveals the presence of a critical issue regarding internal
communication, which can damage the building of a clear and strong festival brand
760 personality. Indeed, as brand personality is the main reference for the construction of
discourses between an organization and the customers and it influences marketing
communication in creating and maintaining an effective message (Madhavaram et al., 2005),
a successful brand identity strategy has to inform, guide, nurture and implement the
festival’s overall marketing communication strategy toward brand identity recipients.
Instead, the mismatch between management intentions and communication on social media
is a signal that the Comicon management finds it hard to adapt and effectively integrates
social media into existing organizational marketing structures, processes and operations
(Valos et al., 2017). Therefore, Comicon organizers should adopt organizational mechanisms
to align the contents of discourses delivered by social media managers with the intended
brand personality by organizers.

Communicated personality vs perceived personality: the external brand personality gap and
ultimate brand personality
The results also unveil the existence of “external brand personality gap” because the
Comicon brand personality communicated on Twitter and Facebook does not match the one
perceived by social media users. Comicon festival organizers should devote more careful
attention to the lack of consistency between communicated and perceived brand personality.
Indeed, as highlighted in the literature, the long-term and strong discrepancies in brand
personality between the organization and the customers may result in damages of brand
value that are difficult to recover (Malär et al., 2011). This problem is even more relevant in
the event industry, where the brand helps event managers make an intangible phenomenon
more tangible for event consumers (Bowdin et al., 2012).
The identified external brand personality gap should represent an incentive for Comicon
social media managers to better calibrate the contents of the communication based on the
characteristics and the needs of the target. Overall, customers seem to have missed some
features of brand personality (“cultured,” “reliable” and “various”). However, this is an
opportunity for the festival’s organizers to reconsider the Comicon brand personality in light
of a better understanding of the customers who emphasize features:
 more than the organizers do (“funny”);
 not intended by the organizers but nevertheless communicated (“exciting” and
“extraordinary”); and
 neither communicated nor intended (“enjoyable” or “chaotic”).

In the last case, the results provide evidence that social media users can contribute to co-
creation of the festival brand personality with items not communicated (and not even
intended) by the organization (Cayla and Arnould, 2008). In this sense, the ultimate festival
brand personality that emerges on social media is the outcome of a co-creation activity
between the organization and the users, and it is represented by the intersection between the
items communicated by the organization and those perceived by the customers (Figure 3).
Such “ultimate brand personality” represents a collective and dynamic construct that is co-
 Internal
Brand
External
Brand
Perceived
Organization Personality Personality Customer brand
Communication
Gap
activities to
Gap personality
Intended Brand Perceived Brand
transmit message
Personality Personality

761
Unfit

Intended Perceived
Brand Brand Figure 3.
Personality Personality Brand personality
Items Items and co-creation with
customers – the
ultimate brand
personality
Ultimate Brand Personality

created by the organization and its customers, which stems from a continuous and
interactive process (Hennig-Thurau et al., 2013; Tajvidi et al., 2018).

The role of customers’ experiences in the creation of festival brand personality in the social
media environment
Finally, the results show that the statistical differences between the distributions of
organizers’ and users’ brand personality items decrease when moving from the content
analysis of posts/tweets released before and during the event to those released after the
conclusion. This is an extremely interesting finding, and this circumstance suggests that
the Comicon “product” is consistent with the characteristics that the organizers attribute to
the event and that the experience of participation also drives visitors’ perceptions in this
direction. But this also indicates that Comicon organizers should pay more attention to their
social media communication, especially before the event, to avoid the external brand
personality gap becoming so large that it can no longer be filled through the experience of
participation.
These results provide an answer to the request from Ramaswamy and Ozcan (2016), who
suggested future research dealing with branding topics should focus more attention on the
experiential side that is connected to the creation and management of brand personality. In
addition, these results are consistent with recent studies in event management (Getz and
Page, 2016; Lee et al., 2017), which argue that visitor experiences are essential.

Conclusions
Some scholars have recently called for greater research on managing festival brand
personality in the social media environment (Moro and Rita, 2018), while another scholar
pointed out that “festival research is often criticized for the lack of rigorous research
methods being used and the generalizability of the results” (Van Niekerk, 2017, p. 843). This
paper answers this request and contributes to the literature on event branding in social
media by showing a case of a festival’s multiple identities.
IJCHM In summary, the research findings show that internal brand personality gap (between the
32,2 intended and communicated event brand personality) and external brand personality gap
(between the communicated and perceived event brand personality) can emerge. The results
also highlight the existence of a construct of brand personality co-created with customers on
social media (ultimate brand personality). Finally, this research shows that time matters as
well as the customers’ experiences regarding branding management in an event setting.
762 These results contribute to the literature on event branding and provide suggestions for
future research aimed at avoiding “tout-court translations” of the research background from
the consumers goods industries to tourism, or more widely, to service contexts. Moreover,
they highlight important implications for practice as discussed below.

Theoretical implications
This research provides evidence of a significant difference between brand personality items
that a festival’s organizers intend to communicate and the brand personality items that they
actually communicate through social media. This is one of the first attempts to distinguish
between the intended festival brand personality and the communicated festival brand
personality in the digital domain. Prior studies have often confused intended brand
personality with the brand personality “communicated” by the organization; however, this
does not necessarily perfectly fit with the one desired by managers (as results show).
Instead, by acknowledging the request from Ranfagni et al. (2016, p. 82), the research
identified the “real” intended brand personality because of an original methodology that
integrates the analysis with questionnaires sent to festival managers. Broadly, the proposed
multi-method approach, which relies both on a “communication chain” framework and on
the free-listing psychological meaning model of Friedmann (1986), performs a content
analysis on social media platforms and fills the gap of methods needed to deepen the
understanding about branding in hospitality and tourism (Moro and Rita, 2018).
This study also assesses the multiple identities of the festival as determined by the
existence of external brand personality gap. The differences between communicated and
perceived brand personality suggest different considerations related to their meaning and
provide several implications for theory. In fact, a perceived brand personality that does not
match the communicated brand personality may represent an incentive for the event’s social
media managers to adjust the contents of communication to the characteristics and needs of
their target. However, such misalignment may also suggest that event organizers should
reconsider the intended event brand personality in light of the co-creational role of social
media users. In detail, the results show that it is not possible to “freeze” brand personality in
social media, which instead often becomes a dynamic construct. In particular, the ultimate
brand personality that is potentially emerging on social media should be considered a
starting point to work on brand personality by examining in greater detail the “unfit area.”
Indeed, the “fit/unfit” problem of the traditional communication models needs to be
reconsidered and the “unfitting” can be neither ignored nor always considered “a problem”
that the organization must autonomously correct by looking only inside the brand
personality statement of the event organizers. The “unfit area” is an effect that should
always be monitored, and in some cases, should be considered a signal of the contribution of
the customers to a co-created brand personality.
Furthermore, the results of the research point out the importance of the customer
experience as a relevant theme to deepen the understanding of the creation and management
of event brand personality. These findings are consistent with recent works about the
importance of temporal analysis when dealing with the topic of the social media activity
related to festivals and events (MacKay et al., 2017) and demonstrate that the time point of
the analysis of social media content is crucial for brand personality, especially in the service Perceived
context. This suggests that other scholars should consider and evaluate the impact of these brand
outcomes on future studies.
Finally, this study represents one of the first attempts to analyze intended,
personality
communicated and perceived brand personality through social media in the festival and
non-sport event domains. This paper suggests a unique model for festival organizers to go
beyond sport discourse and think about specific models for the cultural event industry.
Thus, by providing insights in the literature dealing with brand personality issues in the 763
social media environment, this study contributes to a research stream that is still in its
infancy.

Practical implications
The unveiling of the existence of the “internal brand personality gap” highlights a
significant risk in the creation of a consistent festival brand personality. To minimize such
risk, event organizations should invest in integrated marketing communication (IMC) to
ensure that the brand personality items defined by top management are clearly understood
and embraced by all staff involved in brand personality communication on social media
(Henninger et al., 2017). Internal communication is crucial for sharing intended brand
personality and assuring consistency in the communication activities by avoiding the gap
between strategy formulation and strategy execution on social media. This is a key issue for
managing brands in the social media context where “real-time” communication needs to be
sustained by a very quick and effective decision-making process at each organizational
level, especially with reference to a “message” (namely, the brand personality), which, by
nature, is difficult to convey. Furthermore, this is even more necessary for services, which
are by their nature heterogeneous and therefore require a strong consistency in the branding
process to create an effective brand personality (de Chernatony et al., 2003). Subsequently,
event organizations should not undervalue the importance of integrating social media
within IMC activities and invest in vertical and horizontal communications.
Concurrently, the research results underline the importance for social media managers of
events to check for the existence of the “external brand personality gap,” which can
undermine long-term brand equity. As social media tools enable real-time and continuous
monitoring of communication activities, the festival’s organizers should exploit such tools to
verify whether and to what extent the perceived brand personality does not match the
communicated personality. In particular, the festival’s organizers should control, through
quantitative and qualitative methods as well as content analysis of tweets and posts,
whether the perceived brand personality embodies attributes that are disliked by the
organization and should accordingly revise these communication activities (Ramaswamy
and Ozcan, 2016).
Finally, the “unfit area” unveiled in the “ultimate brand personality” needs further
understanding and subsequent decisions by the event organizations.
On the one side and for the items within the intended personality that are not embodied
in the “ultimate brand personality,” the event organizations should work to fill in the gap (as
previously discussed). However, the event organizations should also reconsider if, in light of
the co-creating contributions of customers in the social media domain, a change in the
intended personality is desirable with the dismissal of some items. On the other side and for
the brand personality items perceived by users that are not embodied in the “ultimate brand
personality,” the organizations should evaluate such items and work to remove the causes of
the emerging misalignment. However, event organizations should also reconsider if a
change in the intended personality is desirable with the introduction of some items that are
IJCHM perceived, “experienced” and then communicated and shared by the customers. In addition,
32,2 this misalignment can represent a significant indicator that the event is moving through its
life cycle and is entering a different stage of its evolutionary trajectory (Holmes and Ali-
Knight, 2016).

Limitations and future research

764 Several limitations of this study should be considered. First, the content analysis was
conducted through a non-automatic textual codifying method (automatic codifying is not
available on NVivo 11 for the Italian language). Subsequently, the authors were forced to
select a census of posts and tweets for one event related to a limited time period because of
the huge amount of data to analyze. Although “human codification” could present some
advantages in capturing difficult meanings, such as brand personality items, future
automatic textual analysis could replicate the research with a much broader spectrum of
data and also compare the results among multiple events.
Moreover, the authors restricted the analysis to the textual content; however, the current
use of pictures and videos linked to messages is very frequent, especially in the case of
festivals and events. In addition, future analysis should also examine materials that can be
very effective in conveying the meaning associated with festival brand personality and also
consider social media that mainly relies on pictures and videos such as Instagram and
YouTube.
Finally, it should be emphasized that the last part of the methodology relies on non-
parametric statistical tools based on the analysis of the frequencies. Further studies, through
the integration of collected data, could adopt more sophisticated statistical methodologies of
analysis to test the model and/or assess the validity of the results in other contexts.
Notwithstanding these limitations, this study proposes a method that can be used in the
event setting to improve branding strategy and marketing activities and can be successfully
applied to other festivals, cultural events or even to the hospitality industry and destination
management. Moreover, it can be replicated by other studies to further analyze whether the
intended brand personality is successfully (or not) communicated on social media by
examining, for instance, the contingent factors that can affect the final results (such as
industry, market segments or other stakeholders reached by social media).

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Corresponding author
Barbara Masiello can be contacted at: [email protected]

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