Personalidade de marca em meios de hospedagem

Abstract

Brands are intangible assets that integrate the relationship process between companies and consumers. Among various segments that find in branding a way for building their strategies, there is the lodging industry. In times of fierce competitiveness and to deal with the tourist‘s behavioral changes in the twenty-first century, creating values for theirs brands provides competitive advantage. The combination of the brands characteristics with human personalities is one scientifically proven way to create this value. Therefore, the present study aims to identify the presence of personalities in hotel brands focused on sun and beach tourism. The objective of this research is to analyze the personalities of the Brand Personality Scale (BPS) of Jennifer Aaker (1997) that can be perceived in the brands of Via Costeira hotels in the city of Natal, capital do the State of Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil. It is a descriptive-exploratory study, with quantitative and qualitative approach. For doing the research, at first, 405 surveys were applied whose approach involved the recognition of 41 personality traits proposed by the research instrument on these establishments and using the Likert Scale from 0 to 10. In addition, it was also investigated the alignment of this scale with the mission, vision and values statements from each hotel. And finally, suggestions from experts in marketing and branding were collected about ways to develop brands in the hotel industry. The results showed that only four of the BPS five dimensions – sincerity, sophistication, competence and excitement – were considered applicable for all sample participants and in this same sequence of decreasing values of means, as described by the Tukey test that was used as a complement for comparative purpose between hotel means. In the mission, mission and values statements of the samples, it was verified the predominance of characteristics more closely related to the competence and sincerity dimensions. Finally, experts affirmed that hotels can form brands with personalities and suggested some necessary actions to achieve such triumph. The results presented were satisfactory and confirmed the existence of personality in the hotel brands from Natal, but that perception still has chance to be improved.