Project Details
Projekt
Visual brand presence in digital social media; first funding period: Setup and Design of Networks by Providers.
Applicant
Professor Dr. Mark Heitmann
Subject Area
Accounting and Finance
Term
from 2014 to 2023
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 163849297
More than 3 billion images are shared every day on digital social media (DSM) such as Twitter, Snapchat or WhatsApp. These image data have not been investigated in scientific marketing research despite the growing number of brand logos in DSM. Applications include social media campaigns and tracking of visual brand presence relative to competition. In the second funding period, the marketing relevance of visual brand presence shall be investigated. Stylized facts on campaign optimization and performance indicators shall be developed. Project A2 is a natural extension of the previous research, which was limited to text communication with empirical applications in the music industry. According to the results, specific content categories of firm communication impact online demand, network structure and network communication over and above communication volume. Considering the development in the meantime, this research now investigates brand-related visual communication across more industries. Machine learning algorithms are available to accomplish this. These are capable of detecting objects and faces with increasing precision and can be relatively easily trained to detect brand logos. Empirically, Twitter appears an appropriate medium of investigation, since it has reached a particular prominence with regard to publicly accessible image communication. 8.5 million Tweets on more than 270 different brands of various industries have been collected so far. On a post level, these data allow studying which factors are conducive to the dissemination of brand logos in DSM (e.g., size/ position of logo, surrounding objects, faces, sentiments, contrasts, associated texts). Google search queries, website traffic and survey based brand trackings are available at the brand level to investigate the relationship between visual brand presence and brand success across time. The results will provide a first scientific indication on the relevance of visual brand presence in DSM and point out key success factors in terms of DSM dissemination.
DFG Programme
Research Units
