Abstract
Purpose– The purpose of this exploratory study is to propose a new methodological approach to investigate brand associations. More specifically, the study aims to show how brand associations can be identified and analysed in an online community of international consumers of fashion to determine the degree of matching with company-defined brand associations.Design/methodology/approach– The methodology is two-pronged, integrating qualitative market research techniques with quantitative text mining. It was applied to determine types and perceptions of brand associations among fashion bloggers with reference to three leading Italian fashion houses. These were then compared to brand associations found in company-generated texts to measure the degree of matching.Findings– The results showed consistent brand associations across the three brands, as well as substantial matching with company-defined brand associations. In addition, the analysis revealed the presence of distinctive brand association themes that shed further light on how brand attributes were perceived by blog participants.Practical implications– The methods described can be used by managers to identify and reinforce favourable brand associations among consumers. This knowledge can then be applied towards developing and implementing effective brand strategies.Originality/value– The authors propose an interdisciplinary approach to investigate brand associations in online communities. It incorporates text mining and computer-assisted textual analysis as techniques borrowed from the field of linguistics which have thus far seen little application in marketing studies, but can nonetheless provide important insights for strategic brand management.
Highlights
Authoring content should be possible in a straight-forward manner to not distract the writer from her stream of thoughts
All pages reside within one conceptual level, woven together by mere hyperlinks that result from specially formatted words, so called CamelCase or WikiWords, i.e. names made up by concatenating capitalized words
SHAWN accepts a variety of commands to be embedded on Wiki pages to generate content gathered from all available data
Summary
Authoring content should be possible in a straight-forward manner to not distract the writer from her stream of thoughts. On Wiki driven sites users may author content on the web site itself without even knowing HTML. The downside of this quick approach is that specific information is hard to find and the user is quickly lost in an abundance of Wiki pages. All pages reside within one conceptual level, woven together by mere hyperlinks that result from specially formatted words, so called CamelCase or WikiWords, i.e. names made up by concatenating capitalized words Following such a Wiki link leads to a Wiki page with that name. Assuming each Wiki page resembles a (real world) concept, arbitrary relationships between concepts of any kind can be modelled This relationship data is entered on Wiki pages in a straightforward and usable manner.
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