“Design and validation of the Brand Personality Scale in Tourist Destinations”

The new modality caused by COVID-19 has significantly affected tourism, from the decrease in demand and the deterioration of facilities due to lack of budget to the point of becoming unattractive. In response to this, the objective of this research work is to design and validate a scale to measure Brand Personality in Tourist Destinations (BPTD). The results were structured in three phases. In the first phase, an exhaus- tive search of the bibliography and first version of the instrument were generated. Moreover, a panel of 12 professionals between academics and managers was held, who evaluated the features and content validation by a panel of 7 experts. In the second phase, data collection was carried out with the participation of 998 tourists. In the third phase, exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis was carried out, obtain-ing a KMO of 0.979 and a p-value of 0.000. The total explained variance of the 21 items grouped in three dimensions represents 87.27%. In the confirmatory analysis, χ2 = 921.57, p = 0.000, RMR = 0.069, GFI = 0.917, AGFI = 0.829, CFI = 0.980, TLI = 0.976, NFI = 0.975, IFI = 0.980 and RMSA = 0.065, with an appropriate internal consistency (performance: α = 0.984; social innovation α = 0.982; honesty α = 0.964). Composite reliability was CR > 0.70 and convergent validity was AVE > 0.5. In conclusion, the values imply an acceptable adjustment, for which the model is adequate, and the scale is valid to be applied in tourism.


INTRODUCTION
Tourist destinations have had a decrease in demand due to deterioration due to a lack of budget to the point of becoming undesirable and attractive to visitors (Hultman et al., 2017). In addition to this, COVID-19 significantly affects tourism, since destinations must adapt to the new normality. According to Usakli and Baloglu (2011), to face these challenges, tourist destinations must focus their efforts on re-strengthening the place brand. Moreover, to Greene et al. (2021), it is vital to reflect congruent lifestyles and attitudes with tourists, which will allow positive associations and predisposition to visit. Likewise, Brand Personality (BP) is crucial to creating a differential positioning, and brand-related personality attributes stimulate tourists' destination decisions (Ghosh, 2016).
On the other hand, it is necessary to indicate that tourists tend to perceive tourist destinations as partners in their eagerness to satisfy their self-identification needs. Consequently, they dedicate themselves to attributing human characteristics to brands by expressing their personality or certain traits through the choice of destinations for their subsequent visits. This process is known as anthropomorphizing (Eisend & Stokburger-Sauer, 2013), a key factor in the success of a tourist destination. Undoubtedly, the predisposition to study BP

Brand personality
The BP concept has been studied since the 1950s (Ogilvy, 1955), although it was Aaker, who proposed a definition of the construct in 1997. Plummer (2000) has described that the BP is related to the character of the brand, and Davies (2018) defines it as a set of human characteristics associated with a brand; While for Belk (1988), the brand is considered as an extension of the self.
According to the American Marketing Association (2021), the BP refers to the psychological properties of a particular brand; that is, it is a concept that models the personality of the human being and associates it with the qualities, desires and opinions of a person. Similarly, Kapfer (2003) defines it as a set of human personality traits that are applicable and are associated with the brands. Although Aaker's (1997) work has been the basis for most research, it has also been criticized. A first criticism refers to the vague definition of BP that encompasses several characteristics (such as age, gender, etc.) in addition to personality (Bosnjak et al., 2007;Kapfer, 2003). Other authors have stated that the structure in the validity process suffers from problems of generalization (Caruana et al., 2007;Colmenares & Saavedra, 2008), and leaves researchers and practitioners unsure of what they have measured: perceived BP -an aspect of the sender -or perceived user characteristics -aspects of the receiver (Geuens et al., 2009).

Brand personality in tourist destinations
Theories of congruence brand -consumer are based on the notion that consumers associate human attributes with brands (Lin, 2010;Rauschnabel & Ahuvia, 2014). Therefore, the competitive nature of the current tourism industry encourages destinations to develop their brand and establish effective promotion for tourists (Huang et al., 2017). However, brand attachment develops exclusively when a strong connection is established between the brand and the consumer's self; by satisfying the functional, experiential, or symbolic needs (Park et al., 2006).
When consumers take product quality for granted, and competitors can easily copy product features, strong brand identity and personality are invaluable in building brand equity (Van Rekom et al., 2006). In this case, Malär et al. (2011) state that self-congruence between a brand and a consumer plays an important role in creating an emotional bond with the brand. In a more conceptual approach to the destination branding process, Ekinci (2003) proposes that to be effective, destination brands must establish a BP and create links with the image that the tourist has of himself through the reasons for his trip. According to Murphy et al. (2007), since BP is directly linked to both the global image of the destination and the affective component, it is essential to recognize the possible significant spillover effects on BP and brand loyalty; therefore, for a better understanding of the evolutionary process, studies in this line are neces-sary (Ha, 2016 Therefore, tourist destinations have distinctive characteristics and traits that resemble the personality of the human being, so that their personality plays an important role in the performance and innovation of the brand and the projection of the tourist destination, which is why the purpose of this study is to design and validate a scale to measure Brand Personality in Tourist Destinations (BPTD).

METHOD
The BPTD scale is designed to be applied in different tourist destinations. For its construction, a development framework has been followed that consists of three stages: generate the items, collect the data and confirm the latent structure (Kim et al., 2012;Pereira et al., 2015). For these purposes, the voluntary participation of tourists through informed consent has been considered. At all times, its principles, values, and information privacy were respected. Likewise, the data collected have been used solely for this study and has the approval of the ethics committee of the Postgraduate Unit of the Universidad Peruana Unión.

Item generation
An exhaustive study of the bibliography search was made in databases such as Scopus, Emerald, and Web of Science, taking the first model proposed by Aaker (1997) as a starting point. Until now (2021), the terms entered were Model, Scale, and Brand Personality. After analyzing the bibliography, a first version of the BPTD instrument was made (Deng & Dart, 1994). Next, with a panel of 12 professionals (Churchill, 1979), value-oriented BP traits were added among managers and academics. Then, the content validation was carried out by a panel of experts from different latitudes and with an average of 20 years of experience in consumer behavior research (a total of 7), of which two are of Colombian nationality, two of Mexican nationality, and three of Peruvian nationality; who evaluated sufficiency, clarity, coherence, and relevance, whose Aiken coefficient index is observed in Table 4.
On the other hand, the scale that measures the BPTD was made up of 21 items grouped into 3 dimensions, namely: performance, which is made up of 10 items (efficient, competitive, responsible, strategic, productive, proactive, friendly, welcoming, helpful, engaged); social innovation, with 7 items (collaborative, tolerant, enterprising, creative, innovative, ingenious and attractive); and honesty, with 4 items (generous, fair, sincere and transparent). The scale was designed with 7 response options, in which (1) totally disagrees and (7) totally agrees, considered the most effective in identifying variance (Su & Reynolds, 2019).

Data collection
The features identified in the first stage were organized in a survey that consisted of two parts: the first describes the sociodemographic profile of a tourist, and the second is related to the items that make up the construct. 998 national tourists have been considered (convenience sampling) who visited a tourist destination during the last 12 months.

Latent structure confirmation
This stage consists of two phases. In the first, content validation was carried out, and four criteria were used to evaluate the items: 1 = Does not meet the criteria, 2 = Low level, 3 = Moderate level, and 4 = High level. Likewise, the coefficient V of Aiken (Table 4) quantifies the degree of sufficiency, coherence, relevance, and clarity.
In the second stage, the reliability and validity of the scale were confirmed, for which it was necessary to use the statistical package SPSS in its 26 version. Initially, the data consisted of 1,026 records, missing data was checked, leading to the elimination of 28 cases, and 998 cases were submitted for analysis. Also, an Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) was performed with the principal component analysis method (Papadimitriou et al., 2019) to know the construct's factorial structure. Subsequently, confirmatory factor analysis was performed using the AMOS V24 extension to determine the global fit of the scale.

Sample characterization
The sociodemographic profile of tourists is shown in

Exploratory factor analysis
An exploratory factor analysis was performed to uncover the underlying structure of the 21-item BPTD model. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) statistical test shows a value of 0.979 greater than 0.50 (Kaiser, 1974), which ensures that it is suitable for exploratory factor analysis. Likewise, the Bartlett sphericity test projected a Chi-square of 41,995.020 and a P-value of 0.000 (p < 0.001), which indicates that the correlations are significant between the variables subjected to the analysis (Pan et al., 2017). On the other hand, to fulfil the purpose of the investigation, the method of extraction of principal components and the Varimax rotation was used (Kaiser, 1960).
For its part, the Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) results are detailed in Table 2, in which the final factorial structure explains 87.27% of the total variance, which widely exceeds the suggested value of 60%. In addition, Cronbach's alpha of each factor had values higher than 0.95, indicating substantial internal consistency in each factor (Swailes & McIntyre-Bhatty, 2002). Finally, 21 items were produced in a factorial structure of three dimensions of the personality of the tourist destination ( Table 2). Ten items make up the first factor, seven the second, and four the third, respectively.

BPTD scale validity
Content validation was performed using the coefficient V of Aiken (Table 4) and showed that all dimensions exceed the value V > 0.7 (Aiken, 1985). They were submitted to the calculation to test the convergent and discriminant validity and found to be above the minimum established in all dimensions. CR >0. 70 and AV E > 0.50 (Priporas et al., 2020). Furthermore, concerning discriminant validity, it is achieved if the square root AV E (values in bold in Table 4) is greater than the correlations of the construct (Garanti & Kissi, 2019). Therefore, in this study, it was found that they satisfy the conditions for accepting the discriminant validity of the BPTD instrument in all cases.

DISCUSSION
The main theoretical contribution of this study is that it develops a valid and reliable scale that helps measure the BPTD concept, becoming a tool for the management of tourist destinations. It is necessary to indicate that, as time passes, it is essential to emphasize the management of the BP of the destination due to changes in the perceptions of BP by consumers (Ha, 2016). Therefore, from tourism and marketing, BP also helps to improve trust in the brand (Chaudhuri & Holbrook, 2001).
On the other hand, this study complements the void of a scale that measures the BPTD, since there are several previously carried out studies that have used the BPS model (Pan et al., 2017) and proposed by Aaker (1997), which was initially developed to measure the BP of tangible products and was considered a universal scale (Hanna & Rowley, 2019). However, it is proven that the five dimensions of the BPS scale cannot be applied to other contexts and even more so in crises like the one we are currently experiencing (Caruana et al., 2007;Kakitek, 2018).
Therefore, the growing demand to find an adequate metric to measure BP in current contexts has made institutions and academia call for contributions to satisfy this existing need. Likewise, an emphasis has been placed on the development of BP measures in specific tourist destinations and within a culture, since these variations cause the differences between attitudes and behaviors of tourists. In this sense, Sung  On the other hand, according to the findings found in this study, when tourists express their perception of the place they visit, the concept of BP is three-dimensional: performance, social innovation, and honesty. The entire structure is made up of 21 traits (Figure 1), and on this basis, the BPTD that shows adequate performance could be described as proactive, strategic, productive, helpful, responsible, welcoming, competitive, friendly, efficient, and committed; in which tourists recognize that the infrastructure of the destination is safe, varied and comfortable, in addition to protecting tourists. It should be added that the BPTD, which is perceived as a social innovator, is shown as enterprising, collaborative, creative, tolerant, innovative, ingenious, and attractive, which is why tourists point to these places as entertaining, pleasant, and welcoming. Also, the honest BPTD can be reflected as generous, fair, transparent, and sincere; therefore, it describes tourist destinations that protect their clients by satisfying their needs and desires, projecting values that differentiate them from other options.
In this sense, it is crucial to generate cognitions that generate interest and awareness, such as personality traits perceived by tourists and interest groups. Therefore, it is necessary to invest in tourism, marketing and communication resources to enhance the characteristics of the BPTD and the dimension of maintaining its attractive-  nizes some limitations in studies of the tourism industry, so it is necessary to analyze consumer groups and investigate the moderating effects of each characteristic to find a complete understanding of changes in the proposed model. Although the present investigation provides a useful and practical metric, it has some limitations. This work was directed only to national tourists derived from the restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic and the lack of access to foreign tourists.

CONCLUSION
This work found that the tourists visiting the studied destinations are between 18 and 25 years old, with a bachelor's degree, an average income of 2,300 soles (equivalent to 608 US dollars per month), staying in the destination from 2 to 3 days, and they generally travel accompanied, mainly by relatives. Additionally, the objective of this work is achieved through the design and validation of a scale of Brand Personality in Tourist Destinations (BPTD) with a factorial structure consisting of three dimensions: Performance (performance), social innovation and honesty, and 21 items, with adequate internal consistency, reported in a Cronbach's Alpha coefficient for each dimension: Performance (F1 = 0.984), Social Innovation (F2 = 0.982), Honesty (F3 = 0.964). This model represents a management tool that allows evaluating the tourist's perception from three edges and seeks to pay for the management of the BP being these destinations more inclusive, with a view to the sustainability of tourist destinations.
Additionally, to evaluate the BPTD in new projects, it is important to consider characteristics associated with culture, beliefs, religion, lifestyle, among others. Likewise, it would be convenient to replicate this study in a post-pandemic scenario that considers both national and foreign tourists to evaluate possible significant differences in the perception of the BPTD. Finally, another line of research aims to measure the effects of the BPTD on the intention to visit and recommend tourist destinations.