Capturing associations and sustainable competitiveness of brands from social tags

Abstract

With the explosion of social media, consumers' minds have become important assets in brand competitions. Determining a brand's competitive structure based on consumers' desires is particularly important to effectively establish a brand and maintain sustainable competitiveness. The traditional methods of determining brand competitiveness are costly and time-consuming. In this study, we propose an efficient, systematical, highly automated, and real-time method to determine brand competitiveness based on consumers' brand associations with the brand's social tags. Using a set of 45 brands in the automobile industry and around 50,000 social tags, we compared our brand competitiveness determination method with data provided by Interbrand and directly elicited survey data, finding a significant correlation and a better predictive power in consumers' perceived brand competitiveness than the traditional method. Our proposed method enables managers to create and maintain sustainable brand advantages in consumers' minds.