How the West Sees Jeju: an analysis of westerners’ perception of Jeju’s personality as a destination

How the West Sees Jeju: an analysis of westerners’ perception of Jeju’s personality as a destination

This paper investigates how western visitors perceive Jeju island, South Korea, through an analysis of brand personality traits scraped from online travel blogs from 2000 to 2016. Text data were aggregated, culled and categorized according to Aaker’s five-dimensional brand personality framework. Seasonal, regional, gender and temporal categories were established based on available open source information and the data were cross checked through chi-square tests to determine if linkages exist between brand personality and the four aforementioned categories. Finally, a correspondence analysis was used to draw conclusions and describe trends apparent in the data. Jeju is highly perceived as an exciting and sincere destination but lowly perceived as a competent and sophisticated destination by western tourists. The paper contributes to the growing literature base on destination brand personality and includes a unique analytical approach to target specific visitor demographic perceptions through self-reported experiences.