Social Tags and Brand Maps
Posted: 27 Jan 2016
Date Written: January 1, 2016
Abstract
This research presents an approach to harvest rich, qualitative information in user-generated social tags. Social tags are user-defined keywords being associated with any content generated online by consumers and reflect their perceptions of various objects, including brands and products. Previous research has shown that social tags contain significant informational value in understanding competitive market structure and predicting firm performance. We build on this work to showcase the unique characteristics of social tags compared to other forms of user generated content, and show how tags can be used to construct perceptual maps. We discuss similarities and complementarities of our approach vis-à-vis conventional techniques such as metaphor elicitation and brand concept maps; as well as more recent text mining techniques. The added value of our approach arises specifically from the unconstrained, open-ended and synoptic nature of consumer generated content contained within social tags. We illustrate how marketers can monitor the information in perceptual brand maps by extracting common dynamic trends, visualize the relative competitive position of their brand, and understand heterogeneous perceptions about a brand by discovering distinct clusters of perceptual maps.
Keywords: Social Tags, User Generated Content, Brand Maps, Concept Maps, Consumer Associative Networks, Social Brand Metrics, Brand Management
JEL Classification: M31
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