Capturing Associations and Sustainable Competitiveness of Brands from Social Tags

Xuan Gong, Yunchan Zhu, Rizwan Ali and Ruijin Guo
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Xuan Gong: Economics and Management School, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China
Yunchan Zhu: Economics and Management School, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China
Rizwan Ali: School of Electronic Commerce, Wuhan Technology and Business University, Wuhan 430065, China
Ruijin Guo: Economics and Management School, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China

Sustainability, 2019, vol. 11, issue 6, 1-20

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.

Keywords: brand association; brand competitiveness; social tags; delicious (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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