Marketing

Researchers develop real-time brand reputation-tracking tool

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February 26, 2021

An international team of researchers has come up with a way to track brand reputation in real-time, over time, and they've built a tool to do it, too, according to a North Carolina State University news release.

In fact, in a proof of concept demonstration looking at leading brands, the researchers found that changes in a given brand's stock shares also reflected real-time changes in that same brand's reputation.

"We've developed something we call the Brand Reputation Tracker that mines social media text on Twitter and uses 11 different measures to give us an in-depth understanding of how users feel about individual brands," Bill Rand, research co-lead author and North Carolina State University's Poole College of Management associate professor of marketing, said in the release.

The Brand Reputation Tracker measures include things like "coolness," "goods quality," "social responsibility," and "trustworthiness." Those are then aggregated into three scores, including:

• Value driver score - measures whether stakeholders think a brand is a good value.
• Relationship driver score - assesses how closely stakeholders identify themselves with the brand.
• Brand driver score - accounts for all other factors, including style and popularity.

"The text mining allows us to give a numeric value to each of the measures and each of the driver scores," said Rand, who is also executive director of the school's Business Analytics Initiative. "And we are able to place those numeric values in context by comparing them to the measures and aggregate scores of other brands."

Because social media data is updated constantly, the researchers were able to identify changes in brand reputation in real-time – as well as looking at trend data across days, weeks, months and years. The researchers looked at 100 popular brands as a proof of concept, which demonstrated not just how the tool works, but that it works the release said. For example, the researchers found that for those brands that were publicly traded on the stock market changes in value, relationship and brand driver score were reflected in each brand's stock valuation.

"One possible path forward is to significantly expand the dataset of brands that we're assessing to get a broader understanding of the brand landscape," Rand said. "And because we lay out the methodology we used, this paper allows users to create their own versions of the tool.

For example, users could choose to look only at brands within a given industry category. Or users could modify the tool to focus on other aspects of the brand, such as using a framework to assess the extent to which a brand is viewed as 'green' or 'sustainable.'"

Rand said previous means of brand reputation assessment have required either access to a large quantities of corporate data or the ability to regularly survey thousands of people.

"But the approach we've developed here is more accessible to medium-sized businesses," he said. "It requires only the creation of the initial tool – which is very doable. Then you can plug in publicly available user data from Twitter and start getting usable brand assessment information in real-time."

The paper, "Real-Time Brand Reputation Tracking Using Social Media," appears in the Journal of Marketing. This work was done with support from the University of Oxford's Centre for Corporate Reputation, the Center for Excellence in Service at the University of Maryland and Taiwan's Ministry of Science and Technology.