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OIR
41,7 The brand personalities of brand
communities: an analysis of
online communication
1064 Jeannette Paschen
Kungliga Tekniska Hogskolan, Stockholm, Sweden
Received 29 August 2016
Revised 28 February 2017 Leyland Pitt
Accepted 17 May 2017
Department of Marketing, Faculty of Business Administration,
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada
Jan Kietzmann
Beedie School of Business,
Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada
Amir Dabirian
Department of Marketing,
Kungliga Tekniska Hogskolan, Stockholm, Sweden, and
Mana Farshid
Department of Marketing,
Lulea University of Technology, Lulea, Sweden

Abstract
Purpose – Online brand communities provide a wealth of insights about how consumers perceive and talk
about a brand, rather than what the firm communicates about the brand. The purpose of this paper is to
understand whether the brand personality of an online brand community, rather than of the brand itself, can
be deduced from the online communication within that brand community.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper is empirical in nature. The authors use community-generated
content from eight online brand communities and perform content analysis using the text analysis software
Diction. The authors employ the five brand personality dictionaries (competence, excitement, ruggedness,
sincerity and sophistication) from the Pitt et al. (2007) dictionary source as the basis for the authors’ analysis.
Findings – The paper offers two main contributions. First, it identifies two types of communities:
those focusing on solving functional problems that consumers might encounter with a firm’s offering and
those focusing on broader engagement with the brand. Second, the study serves as a blueprint that marketers
can adopt to analyze online brand communities using a computerized approach. Such a blueprint is beneficial
not only to analyze a firm’s own online brand community but also that of competitors, thus providing insights
into how their brand stacks up against competitor brands.
Originality/value – This is the first paper examining the nature of online brand communities by means of
computerized content analysis. The authors outline a number of areas that marketing scholars could explore
further based on the authors analysis. The paper also highlights implications for marketers when
establishing, managing, monitoring and analyzing online brand communities.
Keywords Branding, Brand personality, Brand community, Content analysis,
Online communities, Diction
Paper type Research paper

Communities, brand communities and online brand communities

The word community comes from the Latin “communitas” or “communis,” referring to
Online Information Review “things held in common.” Urban sociologists and anthropologists have long been interested
Vol. 41 No. 7, 2017
pp. 1064-1075
with what makes a “community,” and have generally agreed that a community is a group of
© Emerald Publishing Limited
1468-4527
three or more people who share, or have things in common. Typically, these shared facets
DOI 10.1108/OIR-08-2016-0235 have included interests, practices, values, norms and also extend to symbols, rituals, as well
as to “laws” (although these might be more in the nature of informal rules) and language Brand
(words that have meanings unique to the community, rather than languages such as English personalities
or German). In the late 1990s, consumer researchers (e.g. Oliver) noted that the groups of of brand
customers who agglomerated around particular brands had much in common with the
notion of community studied by other social scientists. These customer groups also had communities
shared and common interests, and shared symbols, rituals and even rules and language.
Indeed, even for products that appeared similar and comparable, very different brand 1065
communities formed. The cola wars serve as a compelling example. On the one hand, Pepsi’s
brand communities consist of teens and even pre-teens who share a passion for a brand
associated with fun, humor, sports and popular music, often supported by advertisements
featuring such icons as Ray Charles, Michael Jackson and Britney Spears. Coke, on the other
hand, built a brand community of those concerned with topics such as worldwide diversity,
overcoming differences and hardship, and particularly, those with a strong sense of
community and family. In comparison to the liberal, fun-loving Pepsi brand community,
Coke’s members are more conservative. Clearly, the two brand communities were carefully
developed, with the underlying argument that a strong community, supported across
departments within an organization, will enhance the brand (e.g. brand recognition and
loyalty), and thus supporting business-wide goals (e.g. increased competitiveness, sales,
profitability) (Fournier and Lee, 2009). Other notable examples, many of which we use later
in this paper, relate to firms that built strong brand communities to drive business
performance. Apple and Harley-Davidson, for instance, are organizations that took on their
competition, the PC industry and Japanese motorcycle brands, respectively, by following a
business strategy that relied heavily on strong brand communities.
The advent of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s saw brand communities move
online. Online brand communities meant that aficionados of a brand no longer needed to share
common physical space, but could now communicate with each other about the brands they
either loved or hated regardless of distance or time. In many cases, these online brand
communities were set up and managed by the organization behind the brand. Procter &
Gamble’s “Being Girl,” for instance, was set up as an online community in which young,
teenage girls connect to find answers to those difficult questions surrounding adolescence.
In a great number of instances, however, these online groupings were established by members
of the community. The communication that occurs within these communities contains stories
told by community members about their experiences with the brand, queries about the brand
and answers to them, news about the community and about the brand itself and considerable
online chat among the members. Communities that were formed by consumers centered on
their common interest in brands like the car Mini, where Mini owners develop and maintain
relationships with each other because of a shared interest and participation in motor racing
events and car rallies (Broderick et al., 2003), and the Age of Kings Heaven site, a website for
enthusiasts of the Age of Empires software game, where users share ideas about the game
and await a new release of the game (Moon and Sproull, 2001). Online communication
represents a valuable source of data that can be analyzed and structured by social scientists,
and this should ideally lead to greater insight into online brand communities and how they
function. These insights include questions such as how do brand communities evolve and
function? What can marketers behind the brand learn from ongoing dialog within the
community? What opportunities can be identified in the sea of ongoing brand community
conversation, and are there any early warning signals detrimental to the brand that can be
detected? What does the communication within a brand community say about the brand
itself? Does it give insight into the brand’s personality?
The research question addressed in this paper is:
RQ1. Whether the brand personality of a brand community, rather than of the brand itself,
can be deduced from the online communication within that brand community.
OIR The paper is structured as follows: first, we briefly review the literature on brand communities,
41,7 and also give attention to the exploration of the notion of brand personality as discussed in the
marketing literature over the past 20 years. Second, we describe a study that sought to analyze
the online communication that occurs in a number of the best-known online brand communities
in order to determine whether the personalities of those communities are reflected within that
communication. This should not only provide greater insight into the nature of these
1066 communities, and their brand personalities, it will also enable a comparison to be made of
the differences between different brand communities, the offerings they represent and the
members within them. It might also be possible to begin to develop some type of classification
of brand communities that could be insightful to scholars and useful to practitioners.
The results of the study are discussed. Finally, the limitations of the study are acknowledged,
the implications for practitioners are examined and avenues for future research are identified.

Brand communities and brand personality

More than 20 years ago, Schouten and McAlexander (1995), in a seminal paper, defined “a
sub-culture of consumption as a distinctive subgroup of society that self-selects on the basis
of a shared commitment to a particular product class, brand, or consumption activity”
(p. 43). They describe the epic Harley-Davidson “Posse Rides,” in which owners these
motorcycles mingled freely with management, and made full use of the opportunity to tell
executives what was great, right and wrong with “their” brand. The Harley-Davidson brand
and the product were the common bond that held this community together, despite the fact
that the community members came from very diverse demographic and economic
backgrounds. These types of human groupings became known as “brand communities.”
Brand communities are obviously important and of interest to both marketing
practitioners and scholars. Muniz and Schau (2005) describe the grassroots brand
community centered on the defunct Apple Newton, a product abandoned by the marketer
in the late 1990s. Despite the fact that the original offering no longer “exists” from a marketing
perspective, the members of this community communicate about it, still write software
applications for it, and inform and keep in touch with each other about it on a number
of levels. From a customer-experiential perspective when brands are the focal point of
communities, they provide a fabric of relationships in which the customer is situated
(McAlexander et al., 2002). For these brands, customers are more than passive purchasers and
users. They believe that their ownership of, and identity with the brand gives them significant
power over it, and sellers that make decisions regarding it. There are many stories told
(Teerlink and Ozley, 2000; Norris, 1994) of devoted Harley-Davidson community members
remonstrating with company officials of changes made to products under “their” brand, or of
products launched under “their” brand” without due consultation of the brand community.
With the advent of the internet as we know it today, in the mid-1990s, these communities
moved online. Dholakia et al. (2004, pp. 241-242) describe these online communities as
“consumer groups that meet and interact online for the sake of achieving personal as well as
shared goals of their members.” When their focal point is a brand, we can refer to such a
grouping as an online brand community, which Muniz and O’Guinn (2001, p. 412) define as “a
specialized, non-geographically bound community, based on a structured set of social
relationships among admirers of a brand.” Veloutsou and Moutinho (2009, p. 316) elaborate on
this by referring to an online brand community as “an enduring, self-selected group of
consumers, who accept and recognize bonds of membership with each other and the brand.”
But just as brands differ, so do online brand communities. For the marketing manager,
understanding what members of their online brand community talk about and why they act in
certain ways are important facets of managing consumer engagement. They also matter since
conversations in online brand communities can reveal the degree to which what consumers
think and say about the brand is aligned with how a firm wants to be seen by its consumers.
 In the psychology literature (e.g. Hogan, 1991), these two viewpoints are discussed Brand
as intrinsic and extrinsic “personalities.” In the former, internal processes and propensities personalities
that shape people’s behavior, and what they say about themselves allows personality of brand
to be inferred. The latter focuses on how a person is viewed by others and, as a result,
enjoys their respect (or contempt), appreciation (or disapproval), etc. Their status and communities
personality are public and verifiable through the content of the conversations other have
about them. 1067
Marketing scholars have adopted these two viewpoints to study brand personalities.
The intrinsic perspective relates to “what the brand says about itself,” while the extrinsic
point of view focuses on “what consumers say and think about the brand.” Of course,
psychologists have developed lenses to understand individual differences in particular
personality characteristics, such as sociability or irritability (Major et al., 2000). Marketing
scholar have followed suit and developed and employed ways to measure brand personality.
The most widely accepted and used tool to date is Aaker’s (1997) brand personality scale
(BPS). Building on the extrinsic perspective (i.e. what others say about a brand), Aaker
identified 42 personality trait norms that allow researchers and practitioners to compare
brand personalities across different categories. The BPS consists of five dimensions or
traits, namely:
(1) sincerity (down-to-earth, honest, genuine, cheerful);
(2) excitement (daring, spirited, imaginative, up-to-date);
(3) competence (reliable, intelligent, successful);
(4) sophistication (upper-class, charming); and
(5) ruggedness (tough, outdoorsy).
Scholars commonly operationalize the BPS lens by asking respondents to complete
questionnaires about the extent to which different brands, within the same offering category,
possess the dimensions above. This allows an analysis of the traits and a comparison of how
brands match up, depending on their personalities. The BPS itself has been the focus of many
studies (e.g. Azoulay and Kapferer, 2003), and continues to be employed across a wide variety of
contexts, including restaurant brands (Siguaw et al., 1999), business schools (Caruana et al., 2009)
and tourism destinations (Ekinci and Hosany, 2006).
The BPS dimensions have also been adapted so that they could be used to explore brand
personality through research techniques other than questionnaires. Through extensive
lexicographic research, Pitt et al. (2007) identified as many synonyms and terms for
Aaker’s dimensions as possible in order to construct dictionaries representative of the
dimensions. These dictionaries, an extension of Aaker’s work, were then used as reference
bases for computerized content analysis software to study large bodies of text. They were
made available publically (see http://provalisresearch.com/products/content-analysis-
software/wordstat-dictionary/brand-personality-dictionary/), and have been employed
across a range of content analyses (e.g. Opoku et al., 2007; Opoku et al., 2007;
Prayag, 2007; Papania et al., 2008; Haarhoff and Kleyn, 2012; Ting et al., 2012). While these
dictionaries were first developed to gain intrinsic insight into what a brand thinks, or
especially, says, of itself, they are just as useful for studies of online brand communities and
what customers think of a brand’s personality.
In what follows, we describe a study of online brand community websites designed to
explore which dimensions of brand personality they exhibit, and also to determine whether
online brand communities portray different dimensions of brand personality. One objective
is to show how the use of text content from online brand communities, combined with text
analysis software such as Diction (www.dictionsoftware.com), in conjunction with the
Pitt et al. (2007) brand personality dictionaries, offers value to brand managers.
OIR The study
41,7 For a study of online brand communities, an obvious consideration is which communities to
compare. The authors were aware of some online brand communities that were commonly
studied and referenced in the marketing literature (e.g. the Harley Owners Group), but relied
on a practitioner-based list of “10 Exceptional Examples of Brand Communities.” This list
was populated and published by Linkdex (www.linkdex.com/en-us/inked/10-exceptional-ex
1068 amples-of-brand-communities/), a marketing analytics, search engine optimization and
content strategy firm. The firm argues that for all customer-driven firms, a prevalent,
engaged brand community is a key asset. The ten online brand communities selected by
Linkdex, and subsequently chosen by us to study, are shown in Table I.
We only used eight of the ten brand communities in Table I for our analysis. This was
because in the case of HOG and Oracle Community, any access to the brand community
online is restricted to registered members only, and we did not qualify for membership.
It should be borne in mind that we were aware that these online brand communities were
very successful from other studies (e.g. Fischer, 2011; Oliver, 1999; Pulizzi, 2012), but that
their classification and inclusion in this top ten list is based on the assessment of Linkdex.
We do not know much about the criteria used to select them apart from what is available on
the website. Once identified, we then scraped these websites for approximately 6,000 words
each of community-generated content. These data were then converted to text files for
subsequent content analysis.
The text analysis software Diction (www.dictionsoftware.com) was used to analyze the
data. Diction is especially useful for determining the tone of a verbal message. Diction allows
the analyst to incorporate their own dictionaries into the analysis. Because brand personality
was the focus of this study, we used Diction to analyze the text from the websites with the five
brand personality dictionaries (competence, excitement, ruggedness, sincerity and
sophistication) from the Pitt et al. (2007) dictionary source as the basis for computation.
A major benefit of the Diction approach is that the user does not have to spend an inordinate
amount of time “cleaning” text files by removing any html programing language captured,
extraneous and commonly occurring words, such as “brand,” “community,” “customer” and so
forth, as well as common articles and pronouns. Diction simply ignores words that are not in
the dictionaries being used. Another important advantage of Diction is that it can handle a

Brand community
Brand name Primary purpose

Procter & Being Girl “Big sister” addresses health and lifestyle issues facing teenage girls
Gamble and sharing
Random Figment Novel and literature sharing website targeted at teenagers
House
H&R Block H&R Community Learning and sharing of tax information and experiences for taxpayers
Harley- HOG (Harley Owners Engage Harley-Davidson motorcycles owners and enthusiasts
Davidson Group)
Lego Lugnet Converse and collaborate on elaborate Lego Mindstorms projects
Oracle Oracle Community Oracle customers/users share professional and personal information
among members
SAP SCN (SAP Engage members/users in a way that allows users to help each other
Community Network) innovate and address SAP usage issues
Sony PlayStation Provide online space for gamers to connect, and to zone in on specific
Table I. Community interests
Ten exceptional Starbucks My Starbucks Idea A global “customer suggestion box” on which customers can post ideas
examples of online for new offerings
brand communities Nordstrom Nordstrom 1901 Facilitate open conversation with customers through Reddit
large number of files simultaneously. In this study, for example, all the files for the online Brand
brand community websites were analyzed in a single round of processing. The results are personalities
shown in Table II. The scores are Z-scores of the extent to which the combined websites of brand
portrayed the five different dimensions of brand personality.
Excitement is the dimension of brand personality emphasized most in all the brand communities
community websites. This means that much of the communication in these brand
communities is about them being “daring, spirited, imaginative, up-to-date.” The next most 1069
emphasized dimension of brand personality is that of sincerity, which has to do with these
communities communicating that they are “domestic, honest, genuine, and cheerful.” By far,
the least accentuated of the brand personality dimensions is that of sophistication, which has
to do with “glamor, presentation, charm, and romance.” While this may seem a little surprising
for more luxury and fashion brands like Nordstrom, when it is borne in mind that these are
communities which serve members whose motivation is probably not need to impress each
other, this might make more sense. Another observation is that the overall brand personality
profiles of the eight communities are quite similar with most of the variation between them
occurring between the dimensions of ruggedness and competence. Other than that, the
observation is that the communities talk most of excitement, followed by sincerity, then either
confidence or ruggedness, and least of all sophistication, in that order.
In order to explore the variability further, we conducted a simple hierarchical clustering
procedure (Ward’s method) on the data using the JMP statistical software. The results of
this are shown in Table III. Determining the number of clusters in a data set, a quantity
often labeled k is a frequent quandary facing researchers who conduct a cluster analysis,
and a number r of approaches have been suggested to overcome this problem (e.g. Ketchen
and Shook, 1996; Sugar and James, 2003). Choosing the right k is often ambiguous, and
interpreting a cluster analysis usually depends on the on the distribution of points in the
data set and the desired clustering solution the user seeks. Since this research is essentially
exploratory in nature, we desired as simple a clustering solution as possible, especially

BPS dimension
Online brand community Competence Excitement Ruggedness Sincerity Sophistication

Being Girl 42.85 (16.01%) 97.67 (36.49%) 42.81 (15.99%) 83.15 (31.06%) 1.19 (0.44%)
Figment 50.9 (17.85%) 111.9 (39.25%) 30.08 (10.55%) 87.64 (30.74%) 4.56 (1.6%)
H&R Block 34.63 (17.22%) 77.81 (38.68%) 33.21 (16.51%) 54.67 (27.18%) 0.83 (0.41%)
Lugnet 20.28 (10.60%) 70.34 (36.77%) 38.19 (19.96%) 59.22 (30.95%) 3.28 (1.71%) Table II.
Nordstrom 43.26 (17.54%) 95.81 (38.86%) 30.88 (12.52%) 72.24 (29.30%) 4.39 (1.78%) Brand personality
SAP 47.23 (18.08%) 101.65 (38.92%) 29.21 (11.18%) 82.85 (31.72%) 0.22 (0.08%) dimensions by
PlayStation 42.61 (17.06%) 90.63 (36.29%) 28.72 (11.50%) 84.28 (33.74%) 3.53 (1.41%) Z-scores and
Starbucks 49.2 (20.36%) 91.62 (37.91%) 20.4 (8.44%) 79.81 (33.03%) 0.62 (0.26%) percent of total

Cluster 1 Being Girl, Figment,

Nordstrom, PlayStation, SAP, Starbucks Cluster 2 H&R Block, Lugnet

Count 6 2
Competence 46.01 27.46 Table III.
Excitement 98.21 74.08 Cluster means/cluster
Ruggedness 30.35 35.7 centers on brand
Sincerity 81.66 56.95 personality
Sophistication 2.42 2.06 dimensions
OIR given that we were only working with a small number of “labels” in the form of brand
41,7 communities. On the other hand, a PlayStation brand manager might want some of the
device’s games to give the impression of being more tough, rugged and challenging, and
introduce content that communicate these traits. However, at all times, brand managers
attempting to accommodate and work with online brand communities should never forget
some fundamental rules: These are communities that are owned by the members as much as
1070 they are owned by the brand, and attempts to manipulate them could be seen as cynical and
lead to community disillusionment. Furthermore, many members might value the
community precisely for its traits (such as ruggedness), and any attempts to dilute these will
alienate members.
We used the dendogram in Figure 1 as our guide, which indicates that two clear clusters
emerge. We took this as implying that there are two kinds of online brand communities
among the eight studied. The first includes Being Girl, Figment, Nordstrom, PlayStation, SAP
and Starbucks. The second contains only two brand communities, namely, H&R Block and
Lugnet. The differences between the two clusters become obvious when a comparison
between the two clusters is made with regard to their mean scores on the brand personality
dimensions, scored as the cluster centers in Table III. The first cluster scores considerably
higher than the second on all the brand personality dimensions with the exception of
ruggedness (being tough, outdoorsy). When one actually examines the content of the different
websites in more detail, the reasons for this become apparent. Cluster 2 websites focus almost
entirely on solving problems in a tough, no-frills fashion: you have a tax problem?
Here is what you should do. You need to make something work on Lego Mindstorms?

Dendrogram using Ward Linkage

Rescaled Distance Cluster Combine
0 5 10 15 20 25
Sony Playstation 7

Starbucks 8

Nordstroms 5

Figment 2
Y

SAP 6

Being Girl 1

Figure 1.
Dendrogram of brand H&R Block 3
communities on brand
personality
dimensions
LEGO Lugnet 4
These are the steps you should take. Whereas brand communities like Being Girl engage Brand
members on a friendly and intimate basis, and Starbucks talks of all kinds of creative ideas personalities
and how members can contribute, the conversations in Cluster 2 communities are far more of brand
direct and to the point and there is far less emotion displayed or encountered. The individual
brand manager might of course wish to question whether this is really how they would like communities
customer to understand and engage with their brand. For example, a Lego brand manager,
recognizing that the target market could be children and younger consumers, could be 1071
perturbed by the brand community being “too tough,” in a way that might dissuade some
younger customers from participating. The challenge then might be to find ways of
introducing content into the online community that is less tough and rugged, and perhaps
more sincere or exciting.

Limitations, managerial implications and avenues for future research

The importance of understanding the content generated by members of online brand
communities is emphasized by Lamberton and Stephen (2016) in a recent review article.
Using keyword counts from the premier general marketing journals, these scholars track the
changes in academic perspectives that have occurred, in order to gain a macro-level view of
the shifting importance of topics related to social media and digital content since 2000.
Two of the three key themes that emerge from this research are, first, the role this content
plays in facilitating individual expression, and second, the resulting data as a source of
market intelligence. Stated differently, the implications of these two themes are, first, that
marketers should understand consumer-generated content, such as that posted to online
brand communities as a vehicle for brand engagement because community members will
use it to express themselves and their perspectives on brands. Second, that consumer-
generated content becomes a valuable source of information for marketing decision makers.
In the context of the research described in this study, what members contribute to online
brand communities needs to be understood by the organizations behind those brands.
This content also becomes a valuable source of information for marketing decision makers,
as well as an interesting and rich new source of data for marketing scholars. As far as we are
aware, this paper is the first to address the nature of online brand communities by means of
computerized content analysis. Its purpose was not to be exhaustive, but rather to highlight
the issues and phenomena pertaining to studies of online brand communities that could be
explored. This deliberate focus leads to three main limitations. First, to outline the value of
the computer-based analysis of content generated in online brand communities, we simply
had to choose appropriate online communities. We did not validate in a rigorous fashion
that the communities we chose were indeed “exceptional,” as claimed by Linkdex, the source
of the list we used. While the firm does describe the criteria for the inclusion of the ten
best online brand communities in detail, they are nonetheless still dependent on the
assessment of Linkdex. Second, our sample of eight online brand communities is rather
small, but our objective was not to be exhaustive. There are obviously many more online
brand communities, and the inclusion of more communities in a larger study might yield
different or additional results. Third, we did not have access to all the brand communities in
the Linkdex selection, and were unable to analyze the HOG and Oracle content. It is
quite possible that the behavior of participants in closed communities such as these is quite
different from that of the open communities we studied.
Aside from these limitations, the current paper suggests a number of implications for
those in organizations responsible for the interaction and engagement with a brand’s online
communities, and also for marketers in general. First, the findings imply that not all online
brand communities are the same. From our analysis, there appear to be two kinds of
communities: those focused primarily on the solution of problems that customers might
encounter with the offering, and those with a more general purpose of engagement with the
OIR brand, the firm, the offering and the customers. This means that managers should have
41,7 specific objectives in mind when it comes to an online brand community, either in
establishing a new one, or managing an existing one.
The availability of tools such as Diction also means that the content generated in online
brand communities can be tracked and monitored over time. This holds whether the
community has been established by the firm itself, or whether it is an impromptu
1072 community established by fanatical followers who talk about a brand without its explicit
permission (Kietzmann et al., 2011). For example, those responsible for monitoring and
interacting with a brand’s online community can download and quickly content analyze
thousands of words of the latest content, either as another metric of their scheduled brand
monitoring strategy, or when special circumstances warrant it, in order to identify whether
new issues or themes have emerged. This would be extraordinarily difficult and time
consuming to achieve with conventional manual content analysis. The application of tools
such as Diction would make this far more feasible.
This leads to a further managerial implication: not only can a firm monitor the content
generated within its own online brand community over time, it can also use computerized
content analysis to compare the conversations in its own community with those of
competitors, and other similar communities, including anti-brand communities
(Dessart et al., 2012). Finally, this type of analysis can give managers a better idea of
what to curate, and focus on in the activities and conversations within its online brand
community. This will also give insight into the choice of whether the firm should be actively
involved and engaged in the community, or merely monitor the ongoing activities and
conversations within it. As has been argued, consumer engagement is also of pragmatic
relevance: having an engaged consumer base is quickly becoming one of the key objectives
of many marketing professionals (Dessart et al., 2015).
A number of avenues for future research emerge from this work. Obviously, a study
using a larger sample of online brand communities would be insightful, and may indeed
yield different or more detailed results. A sample of online brand communities that were not
necessarily “the best” and even those that had problems, or a different focus would shed
further light on the brand community phenomenon. Furthermore, other dimensions than
those of brand personality as defined by Aaker (1997) could be explored by means of
software such as Diction. For example, Diction’s own five key components of narrative,
namely, activity, optimism, certainty, realism and commonality could be used directly, or,
dictionaries could be constructed for other critical dimensions of brand engagement, such as
those suggested by Kumar and Pansari (2016).
Another interesting comparison that could be made in terms of academic research would
be to explore the differences between online B2B brand communities, and online B2C brand
communities. While our sample includes a few online brand communities that could be
termed B2B (e.g. SAP, and perhaps H&R Block), larger samples of both, for purposes of
comparison, might yield additional insights.
The day-to-day activities of, and engagements with online brand communities, provide
interesting materials for research. However, the occurrence of unusual and sometimes
random or one-off events will also provide interesting opportunities for investigation.
For example, very recently, there have been reports of Starbucks reusable stainless steel
drinking straws causing users to cut themselves (see www.delish.com/food-news/a48516/
starbucks-recalls-stainless-steel-straws/, downloaded August 8, 2016). This is obviously
negative publicity for the brand. An interesting question would be to what extent this topic
plays out in the online brand community, and what the nature of the conversation is.
Finally, we used Diction as our tool for computerized content analysis in this study.
There are a number of other very powerful content analysis software tools that could also
be applied, and that would also offer significant insights, albeit in different ways and
different formats. For example, the original brand personality dictionaries used in this study Brand
came from the work of Pitt et al. (2007), which used WordStat as the content analysis tool. personalities
More recently, Campbell et al. (2011a, b) describe the use of Leximancer, which uses graphic of brand
displays to illustrate content analysis.
communities
Conclusion
This paper was motivated by an interest in whether the brand personality of a brand 1073
community, rather than of the brand itself, can be deduced from the online communication.
We were interested in the extrinsic perspective of a brand’s personality, in other words, in
what brand community members think and say online about a brand rather than what the
firm says about its own brand. Given the lack of established procedures for analyzing the
content users generate in online brand communities, we first identified online brand
communities that are well known and regarded as successful. Using a previously developed
BPS dictionary in the content analysis tool, Diction yielded interesting results. While the
main objective was to introduce these methods as important tools for marketers, and not to
provide an exhaustive overview of the top online brand communities, we illustrated their
value by discussing the variability of two clusters of brand personalities we discovered in
our analysis.
The importance of paying attention to online brand communities and their personalities
keeps increasing, and marketers are well advised to develop and use tools to keep informed
of the actual conversations that happen online. Many new opportunities arise every day that
invite the connected consumer to share brand-related experiences. Resulting positive word
of mouth can be a boon to marketers, and negative word of mouth can quickly, and possibly,
irreparably harm a brand that took a lot of time and care to develop (Kietzmann and
Canhoto, 2013). Possibly more important, consumers today expect marketers to pay
attention to their concerns and to know about the content of the conversation in online
brand and online consumption communities – many platforms exist especially for this
purpose. But monitoring their conversations is not only the prerogative of the firm under
scrutiny. Since many online brand communities are public, a firm should expect that their
competitors will analyze its online brand community’s conversations to keep taps on its
personality and how this might change over time. As a result, monitoring one’s own and the
competition’s online brand communities, across a number of platforms, should be more than
a one-off but rather becoming part of any firm’s ongoing brand monitoring and competitive
analysis strategies. With this in mind, it is the authors’ hope that this paper inspires fellow
researchers and practitioners to pay close attention to brand personalities and to advance
our understanding of online brand communities and how they communicate.

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Corresponding author
Leyland Pitt can be contacted at: lpitt@sfu.ca

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