Brand personality positioning of world heritage sites: A text mining approach

Abstract

World Heritage Sites (WHSs) are perceived as significant tourism brands. However, there is no in-depth analysis of the intangible meaning of World Heritage (WH) cultural attraction types from the visitor’s lens. This study employed text mining and a Brand Personality (BP) lexical approach using WH personality categories to identify types of cultural attractions with intangible meanings in WHSs located in seven countries in Asia and the Pacific and Europe. This enabled the WH personality category distribution for each type of WH cultural attraction found on TripAdvisor to be measured. Accordingly, 9,971 visitor-generated reviews were analyzed and fifteen WHS cultural attraction types in the seven countries identified. The relationships between WH personality categories, the seven countries and WH attraction types were analyzed, and attraction types clustered into four groups. Significant differences were found between Asia and the Pacific and Europe regarding WH personality category distribution.