What photos reveal: Recognizing consumer brand relationships from social media photos

Abstract: 

Consumer Brand Relationships have attracted increasing interest in recent years. Consumers perceive brands like humans and interact with them not only in the real world but also in online social networks. They visit brand pages and post brand-related pictures to their profile pages. These pictures reflect their relationships with brands and represent a valuable source of knowledge for marketing, which, however, has not yet been properly examined by existing research. To fill this research gap, a model for characterizing Consumer Brand Relationships in user generated photos is developed based on existing literature and empirically tested. The study reveals that people are able to recognize consumer-brand-relationships in social media pictures and associate them with specific attributes. Their evaluation is only slightly affected by their personal characteristics.