Development and Application of an IT Artifact Measuring Customer Based Brand Equity, via Social Media Analytics

Abstract

Reaching into consumers' minds and extracting knowledge about their experience during consumer – brand interaction has been one of the dominating areas of research in marketing. Attempts to provide brand equity measurements based on the consumer perspective have seen light in literature, with prevailing methods focusing on the multidimensionality of the construct and using confirmatory factor analysis with structural equations modeling for evaluation of the models. An observed challenge in traditional measures of brand equity is that they are costly to obtain and have a certain lag. This paper addresses the need to shift towards a cross section organizational approach by utilizing big data techniques through mining and analyzing brand-related information from online social networks. We describe the design and evaluation of a conceptual model of ten steps that lays out a proposed method on how social media based brand equity measures could be optioned starting from a business perspective, the technical steps necessary to construct the measure, and conclude with how the results could be interpreted. To illustrate the validity of our model, we apply a multiple case study examining customer-based brand equity for the two leading mobile broadband carriers in North America: AT&T and Verizon. Results suggest that social media can be effectively mined to measure customer based brand equity and return of investment (ROI) of marketing campaigns. Our study contributes to both the marketing and information systems literature, by shedding light on the mechanisms governing the expressions of feelings related to brands in online social media. At the same time, we provide practitioners with an actionable method for measuring customer based brand equity in marketing campaigns.