A twenty-year review of brand and customer loyalty patents and academic literature

Abstract

Brand and consumer loyalty patents are surveyed over a twenty-year period. The purpose of the study is to describe the trends in brand and consumer loyalty patents and integrate them with trends in published academic research. This approach has been used successfully in other areas of research and has led to development of theory, new empirical work, and directions for the future in both academia and practical application (new patents). Following an innovative method for searching literature, comprehensive text mining and content analysis techniques identified four critical topics for enabling brand and consumer loyalty solutions; customer transaction business intelligence (BI) analysis, device platform applications (apps) and user interfaces (UIs), customer relationship management (CRM), and brand equity evaluation (BEE). We present what we believe to be a new paradigm of consumer science research methodology and process, adopting machine language (ML) algorithms for large digital content analytics, to discover consumer science related development phenomena and trends, where human coding and integration of such vast numbers of documents is difficult at best.