ENTER2018 eTourism Conference presentation

1. ENTER 2018 Research Track Slide Number 1
Do DMOs communicate their
emotional brand values? A
comparison between Twitter and
Facebook.
Lidija Lalicica
, Assumpció Huertasb
, Antonio Morenoc
Stefan Gindld
, Mohammed Jabreelc
a
Department of Tourism and Service Management
MODUL University Vienna, Austria
lidija.lalicic@modul.ac.at
b
Departament d'Estudis de Comunicació
Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Spain
sunsi.huertas@urv.cat
c
ITAKA: Intelligent Technologies for Advanced Knowledge Acquisition
Department d'Enginyeria Informàtica i Matemàtiques
Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Spain
antonio.moreno@urv.cat,
mohammed.jabreel@urv.cat
d
Department of New Media and Technology
MODUL University Vienna, Austria
stefan.gindl@modul.ac.at

2. ENTER 2018 Research Track Slide Number 2
AIM
Analyze the emotional communication strategies of the DMOs of
popular European destinations (TripAdvisor, 2017) across Facebook and
Twitter.
1)Looking at the semantic relationship between the adjectives and
emotional values used by destinations
2)If the communication significantly differs across destinations and
across platforms.
Recommendations: DMOs are provided with practical recommendations
on how to align their communication strategies and speak with one
single emotional brand message, without having inconsistencies in the
overall brand message transmitted to various stakeholders.

3. ENTER 2018 Research Track Slide Number 3
Destination branding and
personal values
• Importance of emotional ties for creating a positive destination:
image, brand loyalty and tourist purchase decisions.
• Communication of destination brands: cognitive, functional or
tangible elements of the brand instead of the emotional elements or
brand values (Xiang & Gretzel, 2010).
• Template to analyze the association of certain values with the
content published by the destinations: brand personality scale (Aaker,
1997)
• Methodology of analysis: automatic content analysis, manual or
survey-based (De Moya & Jain, 2013; Oliveira & Panyic, 2015; Huertas & Mariné-Roig, 2016b; Garay &
Cànoves, 2017)
Need for: integrating innovative methods to capture the online communication of
emotional brand values of DMOs in a more robust manner.

4. ENTER 2018 Research Track Slide Number 4
Communication of brand emotional
values in social media
• Stream 1: importance and the influence of social media in the communication
of destination brands (i.e., Govers & Go, 2009; Laroche et al., 2013, Hudson et al., 2015).
• Stream 2: analyze the communication of DMOs’ brands or the brand
destination images that tourists communicate through user-generated
content (Dickinger & Lalicic, 2016; De Moya & Jain, 2013; Stepchenkova & Zhan, 2013).
• Stream 3: communication strategies of DMO in social media
– Twitter: destinations do not use specific adjectives to communicate their identity
– DMO did not identify specific strategies concerning emotional content, very similar
emotional values were communicated, still a dominant focus on the functional
elements (Moreno et al., 2015)

5. ENTER 2018 Research Track Slide Number 5
Method
• Definition of the emotional values associated to a destination brand
Brand Personality Scale (Aaker, 1997) Sincerity, Excitement, Competence and Ruggedness
• Selection of the destinations to be analysed
at least 3000 English tweets, also FB accounts: Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Budapest,
Dublin, Edinburgh, London, Madeira, Paris and Tenerife.
• Retrieval and pre-processing of English tweets and posts sent by official tourist
destinations on Facebook and Twitter
By authors own developed tools
• Semantic analysis of the content of the tweets
– Adjectives in the tweets are linked to the categories
– Natural language parser, WU-palmer ontology-based semantic measure (Wu & Palmer, 1994) for checking
similarity between adjectives and emotional values in WordNet.
– Words must be nouns, .70 similarity higher to an emotional value was included.

6. ENTER 2018 Research Track Slide Number 6
Results
Facebook
# Posts #Adjectives
London 1323 610
Madeira 1006 1936
Edinburgh 847 524
Dublin 402 251
Tenerife 398 637
Amsterdam 386 372
Barcelona 319 1337
Paris 223 229
Budapest 223 197
Berlin 45 42
Twitter
# Tweets #Adjectives
Paris 2058 851
Edinburgh 1935 665
Barcelona 1828 654
Berlin 1797 621
Dublin 1722 456
Madeira 1273 514
Tenerife 1102 490
Amsterdam 940 521
London 633 277
Budapest 159 123
Table 1. Volume of tweets/posts and use of adjectives in the selected destinations
Twitter: 1,000-2,000 tweets in 1 year (an average of 3-6 daily tweets).
Facebook: 500 FB post per year (1/2 post per day)

7. ENTER 2018 Research Track Slide Number 7
Ratio Twitter Ratio Facebook p-value
Paris 5.30 3.17 .050
Edinburgh 5.32 5.95 .001
Barcelona 4.38 4.94 .001
Berlin 2.08 1.21 .130
Dublin 6.53 3.79 .209
Madeira 2.83 4.22 .230
Tenerife 3.30 3.44 .050
Amsterdam 3.57 2.78 .001
London 4.28 5.30 .050
Budapest 1.57 1.87 .001
% emotional adjectives for each
category
Sincerity: FB: 38 TW: 37
Excitement: FB: 28 TW: 26
Competence FB: 17 TW: 11
Sophistication FB: 10 TW: 14
Ruggedness FB: 10 TW: 9

8. ENTER 2018 Research Track Slide Number 8
Tweets Facebook
Fig. 2 Brand personality dimensions- Facebook postsFig. 1. Brand personality dimensions – tweets

9. ENTER 2018 Research Track Slide Number 9
Top 5 subcategories of emotional values mentioned in
Twitter and Facebook
Competence Sophistication Ruggedness
Twitter Facebook Twitter Facebook Twitter Facebook
Leader Reliable Glamourous Glamourous Rugged Rugged
Safe Hard-working Smooth Luxurious Get-away Get-away
Innovative Safe Magical Charming Recreational Recreational
Powerful Responsible Luxurious Smooth Tough Tough
Intelligent Intelligent Charming
Romantic Non-
conformist
Non-
conformist
Sincerity Excitement
Twitter Facebook Twitter Facebook
Honest Honest Fresh Fresh
Down-to-earth Down-to-earth Contemporary Unique
Calm Original Creative Daring
Original Calm Unique Contemporary
Happiness Traditional Daring Creative

10. ENTER 2018 Research Track Slide Number 10
Final Remarks
• The study demonstrates significant differences in the use (activity) and
communication (intensity) of emotional brand values through the two
platforms
– Twitter, the number of tweets, adjectives and referenced emotional values are quite
homogeneous among the observed DMOs.
– Facebook posts demonstrate discrepancies among the destinations.
• The emotional brand values communicated are very similar for all
destinations analyzed; sincerity and excitement.
• DMOs’ communicate through Twitter magical and smooth values.
• Facebook communication focuses on luxurious and charming aspects.
• A call for more distinctive communication strategy regarding emotional brand
values

11. ENTER 2018 Research Track Slide Number 11
Future Research
• DMOs are recommended to verify how their online communicated emotional
brand values coincide with their brand strategies and adapt them.
• Future research:
– a comparison of DMOs’ brand emotional strategies and their online
communication behavior
– new methods such as storytelling
– Include other engagement measurements, such as retweets or likes to
test the effect of communicating brand emotions