Understanding Brand Consistency from Web Content

Brands produce content to engage with the audience continually and tend to maintain a set of human characteristics in their marketing campaigns. In this era of digital marketing, they need to create a lot of content to keep up the engagement with their audiences. However, such kind of content authoring at scale introduces challenges in maintaining consistency in a brand's messaging tone, which is very important from a brand's perspective to ensure a persistent impression for its customers and audiences. In this work, we quantify brand personality and formulate its linguistic features. We score text articles extracted from brand communications on five personality dimensions: sincerity, excitement, competence, ruggedness and sophistication, and show that a linear SVM model achieves a decent F1 score of $0.822$. The linear SVM allows us to annotate a large set of data points free of any annotation error. We utilize this huge annotated dataset to characterize the notion of brand consistency, which is maintaining a company's targeted brand personality across time and over different content categories; we make certain interesting observations. As per our knowledge, this is the first study which investigates brand personality from the company's official websites, and that formulates and analyzes the notion of brand consistency on such a large scale.