The impact of multi-studio franchises on brand-associations in the motion-picture industry
(A2020-60911)

AUTHORS

David Dornekott, Universität Osnabrück

KEYWORDS

user-generated-content; brand-associative-networks; brand-alliances

ABSTRACT

Using an extensive dataset of more than four million comments submitted to social news aggregator reddit.com, collected over the course of a full calendar year, brand associations within the motion picture industry are investigated. A network model of brands is proposed, wherein production studios are connected to individual products via intermediate brands such as actors, franchises and sub-brands. It can be shown that consumers strongly associate titles with their producing companies, as well as other titles produced by those companies, indicating a high salience of producer’s brands in the minds of consumers. Similarly, actors are highly associated with titles they appear in, signifying their importance to the marketing of motion pictures. Evidence of spillover between the brands of competing studios engaged in joint productions of franchises is found, implying that a new challenge to brand management has been introduced by the recent emergence of multi-studio film franchises.