Characterizing consumer-brand-relationships in social media pictures 

Abstract:

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in consumer-brand-relationships. Social Networks have developed to a platform where consumers share their feelings and emotions and sometimes show their relationship towards brands. However, empirical research on consumer-brand-relationships in Social Media has been lacking. Building on existing relationship models the authors develop and test a conceptual model allowing characterizing brand relationships in user generated pictures in Social Networks. The results of an empirical study (n=40) show that people are able to identify consumer-brand-relationships in Social Media pictures as well as to associate relationship types with attributes. The study also reveals that the judgment of consumer-brand-relationships is only influenced to a low degree by peoples’ personal characteristics.