Brazil's image and Brazilian personality: a systematic review from the viewpoint of cordiality.
| Autor | Lourencao, Marina Toledo de Arruda |
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Introduction
In an age of increasing globalization, countries around the world face intense competition for development factors: exports, investment, tourism, students and skilled labor (Rojas-Mendez, Papadopoulos, & Alwan, 2015). Thus, to be successful, countries must be distinctive and improve their image (Hakala, Lemmetyinen, & Kantola, 2013).
Country image can be understood as the totality of all the descriptive, inferential and informational beliefs one has about a given country (Martin & Eroglu, 1993). In other words, it comprises a number of associations that connect a given country to other information from consumer memory (Giraldi, 2016) and relates to the mental representation of a country and its population, including cognitive beliefs about the country's economic and technological development stages, as well as emotional assessments of its social and political systems (Wang, Li, Barnes, & Ahn, 2012).
People have different views of countries, shaped by a variety of influences (Samiee, 2010). According to Rojas-Mendez (2013), associations with a country are increasingly broad, since the level of exposure to foreign products, international media, travel and tourism, migration and the internet is increasingly larger.
To understand how countries are viewed one must consider the following aspects: tourism, government environment, direct investment, immigration, exports, people and culture (Anholt, 2007). Prominent among them is people, an aspect that appears in several assessment scales of a country's cognitive image (Baloglu & Mangaloglu, 2001; Basaran, 2016; Mak, 2017; Papadimitriou, Kaplanidou, & Apostolopoulou, 2018). The image foreigners have of a country's residents may be influenced by previous stereotypes or personal experiences from business or vacation trips (Papadopoulos & Heslop, 2002; Fan, 2010; Moghavvemi, Woosnam, Paramanathan, Musa, & Hamzah, 2017), therefore the residents play a decisive role in building and maintaining the image of a place (Braun, Eshuis, & Klijn, 2014; Moghavvemi et al., 2017). In this sense, the population's support is indispensable for a country to change and strengthen its international reputation (Warren & Dinnie, 2018; Moghavvemi et al., 2017), and understanding its traits may help foment such support and also manage the country'simage (Anholt, 2010). An alternative to understand how the "people" element, that is part of the country's image, is formed is to understand the personality of that people, that is, their main traits, as well as their origin (Silva and Giraldi, 2016). These personality traits are related to the fact that a country has a series of human characteristics associated with consumers and such associations may affect their intentions toward the nation (Rojas-Mendez, 2013).
It is in this sense that this paper seeks to survey and understand the main traits of the personality of the Brazilian people. The goal of the research is to identify, through a systematic review of studies on Brazil's image, the characteristics of the Brazilian personality, associating them with the cordial man of the book Raizes do Brasil (Roots of Brazil). In addition, based on that review, it aims to present an agenda for future management studies, suggesting works in several managerial areas which may be influenced by traits of the Brazilian personality.
The concept of cordial man, which appears in Sergio Buarque de Holanda's work Roots of Brazil, consists of the idea of cordiality, that is, Brazilians' behavior is viewed as being dictated by the heart. In this sense, Holanda (1995) states that cordiality reflects traits of Brazilians' character such as hospitality, generosity, aversion to ritualism and coexistence without over-politeness, characterized by intimacy and individuality.
The concept of cordiality is used in this research as a parameter to compare the characteristics of Brazilian personality that emerge from the literature in the systematic review. Using the cordial man's perspective is a relevant theoretical contribution to the paper, since it addresses the theme of country image and personality from another perspective and may constitute a distinct and multidisciplinary comparison that makes it possible to understand the personality traits of Brazil. In addition, another important theoretical contribution concerns the methodological procedure used in this study, which can be replicated by researchers when studying other nations.
Furthermore, in practical terms, understanding the personality of Brazilians may contribute to several managerial areas. The study of their personality may contribute, for example, to manage negotiations between national and international companies (Pedroso, Massukado-Nakatani, & Mussi, 2009); to understand actions related to Brazilian organizational culture (Chu & Wood, 2008); to boost exports of domestic products (Lourengao & Giraldi, 2017); and also to drive investments (Papadopoulos, Hamzaoui-Essoussi, & Banna, 2016), attract talent (Sidhu, Ho, & Yeok, 2011) and manage Brazil's image as a tourist destination, since the citizens' personality may contribute to attract tourists (Moghavvemi et al., 2017). Thus, outlining Brazilians' personality may bring to light positive characteristics of Brazil's image that need to be reinforced through marketing strategies in those areas and others that need to be improved to strengthen the country's image internally and worldwide so as to contribute to these several managerial areas reported.
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Literature review
2.1 Organizing the literature: theoretical perspectives and backgrounds of residents' personality
Studies on the subject of place management are fragmented and address different perspectives, so it is difficult to build a clear and organized picture on this topic. Starting out with those considerations, this section aims to develop a model that addresses the different contributions on the subject, one whose framework helps in understanding the secondary data analysis featured in the outcomes of this study. The developed model addresses concepts related to three theoretical perspectives which, albeit related, are distinct, namely: management of country identity, management of country brand communication and management of country image. These three perspectives are theoretical backgrounds that lead to the study of residents' personality, which is the topic addressed in the goal of this study.
Regarding the three theoretical perspectives featured in the model in Figure 1, one sees that identity management is related to the country's attributes and its respective self-perception, that is, it refers to the nation's internal perception (Buhmann & Ingenhoff, 2014). Country identity presents characteristics of the nation that can be used in the management of country brand, which is considered a self-representation developed for the strategic communication of local attributes (Buhmann & Ingenhoff, 2014). In this sense, country brand is seen as the manageable part of the image, that is, it is considered an intentionally manageable tool for the purpose of improving the country's image (Knott, Fyall, & Jones, 2016). Finally, country image is understood as being mental representations (Dinnie, 2016) composed of cognitive and emotional elements that people have about a particular country (Roth & Diamantopoulos, 2009). Moreover, this acquired perception can be related to the internal public, that is, the image the internal public has of its own country (Zenker, Braun, & Petersen, 2017) or to the foreign public (Buhmann & Ingenhoff, 2014).
The model presented in Figure 1 also indicates the contextualization of each of the theoretical perspectives in the literature. In this sense, country identity can be represented by several characteristics belonging to the nation. One of the ways of communicating those aspects is through the development of country brands. The brands are used in different contexts, but all use the country's name to indicate their origin. In this sense, the literature shows the existence of studies on: export brands, which use the country's name to promote its products abroad (Lourengao & Giraldi, 2017; Castro & Giraldi, 2018); government brands, which also uses the country's name, but in this case with the purpose of publicizing government actions for the internal public (Ocke, 2013; Zenker et al., 2017); and destination brands, which aims to publicize the country abroad with the goal of attracting tourists (Bassols, 2016).
Last comes the contextualization of country image, the focus of this work. The literature on country image includes studies on the perception of the country's products (Wang et al., 2012); perception of the country as a tourist destination (Mak, 2017); as well as perception on political (Alvarez & Campo, 2014), economic (Ferreira, Lourengao, Giraldi, & Oliveira, 2018), international relations (Mariutti, 2015) and cultural (Lee & Bai, 2016) issues, besides social aspects (Oliveira & Martins, 2009). This paper focuses on the understanding of one of the social aspects of a country, the personality of its citizens (Moghavvmi et al., 2017). Moreover, the understanding of personality traits may offer practical and theoretical contributions, which were also pointed out in Figure 1.
2.2 Brazilians' personality: the cordial man
Regarding the personality of the Brazilian people, there are many complexities involved that require investigation, such as the miscegenation between Indians, Portuguese and blacks, the issue of the Brazilian way of working things out (jeitinho brasileiro) and the concept of the cordial man. The miscegenation at the origin of the Brazilian people was explored by Holanda (1995), Ribeiro (1995), Freyre (1996) and Prado Junior (1996), and, according to those authors, involves the cultural and social diversity of Brazil and its people generated by its historical background. In other words, miscegenation refers to the social and...
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