Large Scale Online Brand Networks to Study Brand Effects

Mining consumer perceptions of brands has been a dominant research area in marketing. The marketing literature provides a well-developed rationale for proposing brands as intangible assets that significantly contribute to firm performance. Consumer-brand perceptions typically collected through surveys or focus groups, require recruitment and interaction with a large set of participants; leading to cost, feasibility and validity issues. The advent of web 2.0 opens the door to the application of a wide range of data-centric approaches which can automate and scale beyond the traditional methods used in marketing science. We address this knowledge area by exploiting social media based brand communities to generate a brand network, incorporating consumer perceptions across a broad ecosystem of brands. A brand network is one in which individual nodes represent brands, and a weighted link between two nodes represents the strength of consumer co-interest in these two brands. The implicit brand-brand network is used to examine two branding effects, in particular, positioning and performance. We use hard and soft clustering algorithms, Walktrap Clustering and Stochastic Block Modelling respectively, to identify subsets of closely related brands; and this provides the basis for examining brand positioning. We also examine how a focal brand’s location in the brand network relates to performance, measured in terms of relative market share. For this, a hierarchical regression analysis is conducted between brand network variables and brand performance. While the size of brand community on Twitter does relate to brand performance, the brand network variables like degree, eigenvector centrality and between-industry links help improve the model fit considerably.