Predicting Perceived Brand Personality with Social Media

Brand personality has been shown to affect a variety of user behaviors such as individual preferences and social interactions. Despite intensive research efforts in human personality assessment, little is known about brand personality and its relationship with social media. Leveraging the theory in marketing, we analyze how brand personality associates with its contributing factors embodied in social media. Based on the analysis of over 10K survey responses and a large corpus of social media data from 219 brands, we quantify the relative importance of factors driving brand personality. The brand personality model developed with social media data achieves predicted R2 values as high as 0.67. We conclude by illustrating how modeling brand personality can help users find brands suiting their personal characteristics and help companies manage brand perceptions.