Unpacking The Mystique of Mobile Digital Content and Its Consumers: Insights for Consumer-Brand Relationships
(A2019-9413)

AUTHORS

Elif Karaosmanoglu, Istanbul Technical University; Meltem Kiygi-Calli, Management Faculty, Department of Business Administration, Kadir Has University

ABSTRACT

Customer relationships have radically transformed into digital interactions. A few statistics that accelerate rapidly to demonstrate this shift include the number of active social media users (3.196 billion with a penetration rate of 42% in total population) as of January 2018, the number of unique mobile users (5.135 billion with a penetration rate of 68% in total population) (Hootsuit, 2018b); the daily total number of tweets 500 million and the percentage of mobile twitter users is 80% (Omnicore, 2018); 1.47 billion people log in Facebook daily and 8 ads per month is clicked by an average Facebook user (Hootsuite, 2018a).

There is an increasing number of sophisticated methods to make sense of co-produced data in non-traditional formats, such as blog posts, online reviews, text messages, e-mails, tweets, retweets, likes, shares, snaps, social media posts. These developments call for an amalgam, a right combination of data science and theories in marketing in order to reveal patterns and provide theoretical and managerial implications.

In this session, we employ a wide range of analytical software tools that were not widely used before (i.e. sentiment analysis, machine learning, supplied dictionaries, Wikipedia background) combined with traditional methodologies (i.e. cluster analysis, experimental analysis) in order to understand digital consumer-brand relationships. The focal interests of the papers are consumer reactions towards location-based delivered in-app push notifications; social network members’ reactions to brand posts in social media; consumers’ mobile service usage commonalities; and social media users’ posts regarding their emotions about brands. We focus on managerially relevant outcomes in all papers, such as customer engagement, customer interaction, emotional and attitudinal responses to brands. The findings are expected to provide companies with various roadmaps in how to handle especially digital and mobile interactions.