Abstract
City branding is becoming more and more popular, not only as a field of research, but also as a practice of local governments. Municipalities attempt to introduce this concept into their sustainable transformation process, positioning a city among its stakeholders as, for instance, an eco-oriented, innovative, or smart city. An idea that fosters building a strong and consistent city brand is brand personality. The aim of the paper is to diagnose a city’s brand personality dimensions/traits communicated via posts published on official Facebook accounts of cities and to identify differences occurring within this scope between cities of two selected Central and Eastern European countries—Poland and Ukraine. To achieve this aim, the research involved a content analysis of 1700 posts published by 34 municipalities representing regional capital cities of Poland and Ukraine. On the basis of these study results, the authors have supplemented the Aaker (1997) five-dimensional scale of brand personality with the sixth dimension: Prosocial Attitude, which includes cooperative and bureaucratic traits, to better comply with the approach of cities to problems of their inhabitants and their surrounding environment, which is consistent with the idea of sustainability. Furthermore, the fifth trait has been added to characteristics which make up Aaker’s Excitement dimension. Dubbed as patriotic, it refers to the city’s activities related to the local celebration of historical events, indicating national pride and identification with its place of residence. Bureaucratic and patriotic traits were quite frequently observed in posts published on the official Facebook accounts of Ukrainian cities. Moreover, the research proves that in case of Polish cities the dominating brand personality dimensions are Sincerity and Excitement. Ukrainian cities tend to exercise communication based on the Sincerity and Competence dimension.
Highlights
Social communication today is moving into the virtual world
The aim of the paper is to diagnose a city’s brand personality dimensions/traits used in the contents/posts of municipalities published on official Facebook accounts of cities and to identify differences within this scope occurring between city governments representing two selected Central and Eastern European countries—Poland and Ukraine, which have a varying level of development and have differing models of public management
New Traits of City Brand Personality Identified during Analysis
Summary
Social communication today is moving into the virtual world. This concerns public organizations which want to effectively influence their recipients and realize goals set for them as well as carry out actions to use the communication tools available within the network [1,2]. According to Sevin [4], social media have the potential to bring two important changes to the practice of place branding: local governments are able to create multimedia content with relatively smaller budgets (compared to traditional media) and social media platforms provide local governments with the tool of virtual office, an instrument that cities begin to use more and more frequently. Few studies have examined how governmental agencies currently use Facebook
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