Overview
Social media allows businesses to communicate easily and quickly with a wide audience. This is particularly attractive for smaller companies due to their limited marketing budget. Smaller companies are often owner-managed. The owner is the figurehead and thus the brand of the company. The personality of the owner and the brand amalgamate. The probably best-known brand personality theory comes from Jennifer Aaker (1997). The theory was developed for larger companies where the company owner is not necessarily the figurehead and brand of the company. Aaker's brand personality was first studied with surveys and later with a lexical dictionary-based Natural Language Processing (NLP) approach in the English-speaking world.
Despite the obvious conceptual link between brand personality and small and medium-sized companies and their economic importance, the brand personality of owner-managed small and medium-sized companies has not been studied so far. The aim is to further statistically and technically refine a recently developed language pattern (Griesser & Lu, 2022) using language data from additional sources such as YouTube, Twitter, Telegram and Swiss online media platforms.
