Country Personality and Self Congruence: a study on Brazil

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the personality of Brazil as a tourism destination and to evaluate the relationship between this variable and the self congruity a group of foreigners has toward the country. A quantitative descriptive research was used, through a survey of 95 respondents. The analytical techniques employed were exploratory factor analysis and the comparison of means. The results obtained indicated that, to the respondents, the personality characteristics of Brazil can be grouped according to five dimensions: Vibration, Competence, Contemporary, Sophistication and Sexy. The latter dimension is one of the main contributions of this research. Another important contribution of this study to the literature is in regard the toself congruity and to the dimensions of personality. In this analysis, the intention was to verify whether, according to level of self congruityof the respondents (high or low), there would be differences in the scores of Brazil personality dimensions. The study concluded that the level of self congruitydoes influence on the scores assigned to the country's personality dimensions, however it does not change the dimensions ranking.