使用社群媒體分析進行品牌延伸評估

Abstract

品牌延伸，定義為使用現有的品牌名稱進入新的產品類別，它是一種重要的品牌戰略，可以降低引入新產品的失敗風險，也可以減少新產品的行銷廣告費用。品牌延伸通常會使用母品牌與延伸產品之間的產品類別相似性和品牌印象契合度來進行評估。 大多數先前的研究使用問卷來評估品牌延伸，這通常是昂貴的，耗時的，並且在調查中對於延伸產品的各種特徵而言也是複雜的。隨著網路和社交媒體的迅速普及，存在越來越多可用的資料來源（例如：線上評論，使用者生成內容），可以直接用來了解消費者對於品牌或產品的想法。 品牌聯想是指在消費者記憶中對於品牌或產品聯想到的任何事物（例如：偏好，感知）。我們利用母品牌與延伸產品的品牌關聯來衡量品牌延伸成功的重要因素（即上述提及的相似性與契合度）。 我們使用社群媒體分析的方法（補足傳統問卷評估方法的缺點），透過文字探勘的技術，從線上產品評論中構建出品牌聯想網絡，並將品牌聯想網絡應用於生成預測模型的變數，以評估品牌延伸的有效性。而我們的實證結果表明，此方法在品牌延伸評估中取得了實用性和滿意的效果。

Brand extension is an important branding strategy to reduce the failure risk of introducing new products. It is defined as using an existing brand name to enter into a new product category. The perceived similarity of product category and perceived fit of brand image between the parent brand and the extended product are commonly used to evaluate the effectiveness of the target brand extension. The survey-based approach for evaluating brand extension is commonly used in practice, which is often costly, time-consuming, and even very complicated when various characteristics of product extension candidates need to be evaluated in a survey. As the rapid popularity of the internet and the expeditious proliferation of social media, there are more and more data sources (e.g., online reviews, user-generated contents), which can directly provide insights into consumers’ perceived brand (or product) associations. Brand associations are anything (e.g., preferences, perceptions) in consumers’ memory that are linked to a brand. We use the brand associations of parent brand and those of extended product to extract salient variables for predicting whether the focal brand extension will be effective or not. Accordingly, we develop a social-media-based approach to complement to the traditional survey-based approach and construct brand association networks from online product reviews. Subsequently, we apply brand association networks and extract variables to construct a predictive model for assessing the effectiveness of brand extensions. Our empirical results suggest that the proposed method demonstrates its utility and achieves a satisfactory effectiveness on brand extension evaluation.