Resumo

The adoption of private sector strategies by the public sector has shed light into the role of marketing, particularly on the perspective of public brands management, with the aim of developing the image of public institutions. Despite the lack of studies of brand personality in the public sector, exploring public brand personalities can be a fertile path for public marketing research, considering that brand personality reflects how people feel about a brand, being a helpful construct in the development of strong public brands, meeting the agenda of a citizen-centered managerial approach.

Regardless of the importance of brand personality, the implementation of branding principles from private sector must respect the characteristics and the agenda of public institutions. In this sense, there are risks involved in the replication of a brand personality model from the private to the public context. On that basis, we question: how do we identify and evaluate public brand personality? Thus, the main objective of this paper is to develop the Public Brand Personality Scale, presenting evidence of validity and reliability of a scientific instrument to measure public brand personality.

Brand personality is the set of human characteristics associated with a brand, affecting brand positioning, experience and loyalty, constituting an important concept in order to build strong public brands connected to the demands and concerns of citizens. In the context of public brands, brand personality is a partner-concept in developing the identity and the image of public brands, contributing to citizens’ perception and better evaluation of public services. However, the development of a specific scale to measure brand personality in the public sector is still a literature gap.

We followed the guidance of Churchill (1979) and Rossiter (2002) regarding scale development in marketing research. First, we conducted a qualitative study with 142 Brazilian citizens of public services in order to generate the pilot version of the scale, using content analysis. We also carried out a judges’ analysis, a semantic analysis and a pre-test. For the quantitative study, we conducted a survey with 548 citizens using the scale generated in the previous phase. For data analysis, we performed Exploratory Factor Analysis, Confirmatory Factor Analysis, using Structural Equation Modeling.

The Public Brand Personality Scale has 15 traits of public brand personality grouped into three dimensions – Efficiency, Relevance, and Credibility, reflecting distinct characteristics that enable us to analyze the way citizens perceive the brand personality of public institutions. All the items reached excellent psychometric indices, and the scale has evidence of exploratory, confirmatory, internal, construct (convergent, divergent and nomological) and content validity, as well as reliability, engendering a reliable scientific instrument to measure public brand personality.

The main objective of this study was to develop and present evidence of validity of the Public Brand Personality Scale to identify the brand personality attributed by citizens to public institutions. The findings point to an operationally valid and reliable measure to measure the perception of personality of public brands, which can be used as a diagnostic tool to support managers of public organizations in their decision-making, so that managers promote greater efficiency in execution public services to strengthen the perception of public brands by citizens, based on scientific evidence.

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