Brand Network Analysis for Identifying Co-Branding and Extension Opportunities

Abstract

The use of co-branding and brand extension strategies, as a way to gain access to new markets and improve overall brand salience, has grown tremendously in the past few decades. Despite the continued success of alliances between brands belonging to diverse categories, there is surprisingly little research on identifying broader cross-category effects using current digital approaches. In our work, we introduce a new, scalable approach for inferring cross-category branding insights using implicit brand networks on social media. Unlike traditional social networks that involve explicit interaction between the entities, links within a brand network are implicit and arise due to common followership between brands on Twitter. Asymmetry among brand pairs is taken into account to calculate the transcendence of brands onto new categories. Transcendence of a brand along any given category is defined as the extent to which its followers overlap with other brands from that category. Asymmetry is also leveraged to show which brands will benefit more from a cobranding alliance. Overall, the analysis is conducted at different time periods to track shifts in brand transcendence and investigate its impact on co-branding opportunities. All findings are validated against external survey ratings and extensive robustness checks are conducted.