Social Tag Maps · Mapping Products on Social Tagging Networks: Insights for Demand Forecast and Positioning

Mapping Products on Social Tagging Networks: Insights for Demand Forecast and Positioning

The advent of user-generated content has revolutionized the arts and science of marketing research by making available a significant amount of online data that reflect consumers’ opinions, attitudes, and preferences for products, services, brands and concepts. However, despite the availability of rich information, online users as well as marketing managers/researchers have a hard time “digesting” this abundant information. This project focused on one such form of user generated content – social tags. Social tags fill the need for organizing and discovering relevant information more efficiently by providing a system to categorize information based on topical relevance. In social tagging, content is connected through user-generated keywords—“tags”—and is readily searchable through these tags. The rich associative information that social tagging provides, offers marketers new opportunities to infer brand associative networks. This project developed a new approach to process this tag information for understanding how consumers think, feel, conceptualize and associate with products. Key in the project was the construction of a product positioning map that uses the associative networks of social tags. This is a novel approach that can contribute to the marketing field in many respects. While existing approaches to create concept maps or positioning maps rely on elicited associations either from consumer interviews or from text mining algorithms the method used in this project utilizes keywords directly stated by online users to describe a product. Hence, our approach is less vulnerable to potential errors or biases involved in the elicitation stage and is able to provide richer and unbounded associations linked to a brand. On top of that, using the positioning maps based on social tags, marketers can have access to real-time updates of product positioning maps. We believe that our new tools and measures can be a good complement of a firm’s market research.and demonstrates the informational value of social tagging networks in the context of product sales prediction. After controlling for accounting metrics, media citations, and other user-generated content, it was found that social tag–based brand management metrics, capturing brand familiarity, favorability of associations, and competitive overlaps of brand associations can explain unanticipated stock returns. In addition, it was found that in managing brand equity, it is more important for strong brands to enhance category dominance, whereas it is more critical for weak brands to enhance connectedness. The findings from this project suggest a new way for practitioners to track, measure, and manage intangible brand equity; proactively improve brand performance; and influence a firm’s financial performance.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union