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Gaining Marketing Knowledge from Social Media Images

The flood of images

The lavish party with friends, the holiday on the beach, the newly acquired smartphone – all of this is captured on camera and shared via social networks. The flood of images is large: The photo-sharing platform Flickr, for example, already includes 8 billion images. Around 3.5 million are added every day. 1.15 billion Facebook users upload on average of 350 million photos per day. The entire photo database of Facebook already counts 250 billion photos.

Highlights

  • Brand love study with 148,393 social media photos from 503 Germans and Americans 
  • Social media image study of 41 FMCG (Fast-Moving Consumer Goods) brands with 47,988 photos, 57,984 textual posts, online survey with 1,000 people and purchasing data from a panel of 30,000 households 
  • Study on consumer-brand interactions with 941,731 social media images 
  • Study on beauty trends with 16,568 social media photos 
  • Study on confectionery brands with 49,074 social media photos 

Social media images as a source of knowledge

These snapshots do not only provide insight into the lives of users, they also reflect their attitudes and experiences towards brands and products. And they influence a potentially large circle of viewers. Images often have a greater impact than text because they are perceived more subtly and have a stronger influence on the emotions of the viewer. User-generated photos also have a high level of credibility compared to professional photos. Social media images, therefore, represent a rich source of data for market research – which, however, has so far hardly been usable because existing tools for social media analysis focus on textual postings.

Computer vision for gaining marketing knowledge

Due to the large number of images on social networks, manual evaluation is only possible to a limited extent, and automated methods for image analysis are necessary. For this reason, we developed the PictureScan tool, which gains marketing-relevant knowledge from user-generated photos. The content of the image will first be recognized using methods from the field of computer vision. Awareness, popularity, usage situations of brands, products and consumers and interactions with them can be determined through further analyses. These key figures are evaluated in comparison to the competition and over a period of time. In this way, trends can be uncovered, and opportunities and risks for corporate image and sales can be estimated.

Awards

Events

  • IEEE Conference on Multimedia Information Processing and Retrieval, March 2019, San Jose 
  • General Online Research, March 2019, Cologne 
  • IEEE Conference on Multimedia Information Processing and Retrieval, April 2018, Miami 
  • Predictive Analytics World, November 2018, Berlin 
  • South African Marketing Research Association Annual Conference, Oct 2017, Cape Town 
  • International Colloquium on Corporate Branding, Identity, Image and Reputation, Sept 2017, London 
  • International Conference on Image Analysis and Processing, Sept. 2017, Catania 
  • Bayreuth Economic Congress, May 2017, Bayreuth 
  • Photo Industry Association Congress, March 2017, Frankfurt 
  • AMA Summer Marketing Educators' Conference, Aug. 2016, Atlanta 
  • ESOMAR Congress, Sept. 2016, New Orleans 
  • Ludwig Ehrhard Symposium, August 2016, Nuremberg 
  • Research Plus, July 2016, Nuremberg 
  • BVM Congress, April 2016, Berlin 
  • European Marketing Academy Conference, June 2014, Valencia 
  • Social media conference of the Federal Statistical Office, June 2013, Wiesbaden

Project team

Cooperation partner

  • Prof. Dr. Rainer Lienhart, Universität Augsburg
  • Prof. Dr. Aaron Ahuvia, University of Michigan-Dearborn

Publications

Contact

Dr. Carolin Kaiser

Head of Artificial Intelligence

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