Run Over the Blog

Master’s Degree in Marketing e ComunicazioneCorso di Laurea EM7 IM 2015 in xxxxxxxxxx ordinamento Final Thesis Tesi di Laurea Run Over the TitoloBlog Eventuale sottotitolo Supervisor Ch. Prof. Vladi Finotto Assistant supervisor Ch. Prof. Warglien Massimo Relatore GraduandCh. Prof. Nome Cognome Giorgia Molocchi MatricolationCorrelatore 852400 Ch. Prof. Nome Cognome Academic Year 2018 / 2019 Laureando Nome e Cognome Matricola xxxxxxxxx Anno Accademico 200x / 200x Introduction Chapter 1 About UGC and FGC 1.1 Introduction to UGC p.1 1.2 The Customer Journey p.3 1.3 User Generated Content and World Of Mouth p.6 1.3.1 WOM Analytics p.11 1.4 UGC and FGC p.13 1.5 UGC Weight p.17 1.6 Social Communities: How Does It Work? P.21 1.7 Communities, Internet and What Happens in the World. P.25 Chapter 2 The sportswear market: Shoedogs and other stories. 2.1 Introduction to Running Shoes Industry p.32 2.2 The protagonist: The Product p.34 2.2.1 Shoe Developments p.36 2.3 Industry Outlook p.37 2.4 The Audience p.40 2.5 The Main Actors p.43 2.6 The Purchase Channels p.53 Chapter 3 The Communication Strategy Transformation 3.1 Introduction p.55 3.2 Brand Positioning p. 56 3.3 Communication Processes p.58 3.4 The Digital Marketing p.62 3.4.1 Use of the Internet and mobile application p.62 3.4.2 The Social Media Rising p.64 3.5 Target Audience p.68 3.5.1 The Who p.68 3.5.2 Buyer and User Persona p.70 3.6 From Brand to Community p.73 3.6.1 The Involved Consumer p.73 3.6.2 Community Themes p.75 Chapter 4 Blog Analysis 4.1 Introduction p.80 4.2 Why concentrating on blogging? p.82 4.3 The blog research p.84 4.3.1 Introduction to blog selection p.84 4.4 The Analysis p.89 4.4.1 Blog selection and export p.89 4.4.2 Cogito and the chosen method p.94 4.4.3 Cogito for Marketing p.96 4.5 Analysis Launch p.98 4.5.1 General Sentiment Analysis p.99 4.5.2 Main Lemmas and Sentiment Analysis p.101 4.5.3 Analysis between Brands and Sentiment p.102 4.5.4 General Emotion diffusion Analysis p.103 4.5.5 Analysis between main lemmas and Emotions p.107 4.5.6 Analysis between main brands and Emotions p.108 4.6 Single Brands Analysis p.109 4.7 Concluding Remarks p.137 References p.143 Special thanks to Expert System and Paolo Tacconi for a great collaboration and great ideas. INTRODUCTION Which is the link between running shoes market and blogging? Why User Generated Content is a crucial theme if we talk about digital marketing? How can we understand if users like what they comment and which is their real opinion about a product? These questions and many others can be the starting point to our analysis. First we have to talk about User Generated Content, the relationship between users and web. Users online participation is nowadays essential to digital marketing analysis. Digital marketing is nowadays essential to market analysis. This kind of funnel is the core argument of this thesis. The idea that a form of online participation from normal users (not paid for do that) can influence and can change entire marketing strategies, is very interesting. In this perspective sportswear market, more specifically, running shoes market is a narrower area where this kind of online and offline relationship is observed closer than ever thanks to internet. Actually, we know that exists a huge online world of blog and communities dedicated to runners. We have selected a short list of blogs for only athletes and runners where the core arguments are running shoes and running gear. There, they can comment and write about every kind of running shoes brand, model and type without any sort of payment or reward to talk about that. Running blogs are a great example of User Generated Content where participation is amazingly active and constant. At last we can understand how this involvement can influence running shoes firms. Sportswear brands product several shoe models and can evaluate and make different marketing research about those shoes. But at last, users decide if shoes work and are comfort or not. In this perspective we have selected a short list of reviews with relative comments that an Artificial Intelligence Tool can analyse and can find important information about blog texts. Cogito is a platform based on Artificial Intelligence algorithms that mimics the human ability to understand language and complex textual information at scale and with accuracy. The language and textual understanding permit us to find new interesting insights about the sentiment of the User Generated Content and can make emotion taxonomy of the several texts we find. Cogito platform becomes a marketing tool to understand what users want and what runners pretend from their running shoes brands. In that way we can find interesting insights that can answer all of our first questions. The introduction to User Generated Content, the running shoes market explanation and the communication and marketing strategies description are fundamental parts to understand the final analysis. Finally, Cogito analysis gives a short description of what happens in running blogs and how important and influencing is users participation. In this perspective we have tried to answer many questions trying to find new interesting insights about digital marketing world and the use of Artificial Intelligence tools. Chapter 1 About UGC and FGC 1.1 Introduction to UGC Business environment, firm organizational asset and marketers’ work are evolving day by day. Digitalization and advanced technology are the reason of this changing. Companies are selecting always more frequently digital marketing strategies with the aim at raising brand awareness and create trust among customers in order to lead to strengthen the purchase intention. Actually, who creates trust creates a vital component in order to determine the success of companies’ marketing efforts (Tang & Liu, 2015; Cheng & Khan, 2017). In fact, the relationships between trust and purchase intention is strictly dependent: the user that trust in the brand, buys that brand and talks about that brand. With that aim we can concentrate our evolving analysis on the relationship between customers and firms on online communities. In recent years, social media platforms e.g. Instagram (photo-sharing application) have been in commercial interest for companies worldwide since it is fundamentally changing the view of communication and the relationship between companies and consumers (Hoyer et. Al., 2010; Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010; Cheng & Khan, 2017). So we are talking about a “business blending” between social networks 1 and firms, where online communities are the real platform for an equal exchange where customers are users, and users are generators of the contents that they-self use and share. It could be seen as a circular or mutual relationship and exchange, but we can consider this phenomenon as the encore performance of what happened in the squares, or in the places where people meet each other and talked suggesting places, staffs and people who already know. In that way social media has empowered and enabled customer-to- customer interaction and companies are therefore not the only source of brand communication (Li & Bernoff, 2011, Cheng & Khan, 2017). In fact the market is evolving to consumer-to-consumer approach. In this range we can find an important element. Consumers create and share what they want, and that is User Generated Content. Actually, we are talking about any form of content that the user wants to communicate on online platforms such as social medias. The posted content can be any kind of expression, from images to videos and originally created by the user or re-posted from other users. The user’s aim is to communicate a special idea, an opinion or just a funny thing that can entertain the readers. Generally users are motivated by the desire to express themself, or just to connect peers, another way users decide to post something sometimes is because of the aim at achieving notoriety or prestige in a social community. In any case, User Generated Content is generally posted without any institutional or commercial market contextualization. Users are not paid people, outsiders that do not come from any label or professional routine and practices. Since we are illustrating how the market is overturning the roles and the buyers are becoming the promoters, and at the same time the mind behind the idea of products is the same buyer of the product, we want to know what labels do. Of course as we talk about User Generated Content, there is also the Firm Generated Content, a way that the firm choose to communicate on the web with its consumers. In this case we are mentioning the interaction of labels on social networks, posting contents created by the firms to 2 communicate their values, their characteristics and any kind of useful proposition to engage user audience on Internet. In line with this, Schivinski and Dabrowski (2016) explain that consumers are increasingly using social media to obtain product and brand related information as part of their purchasing process. This is aligned with the fact that brand advertising is increasingly communicated through social media (Dennerhardt, 2014, Cheng & Khan, 2017). Therefore, brand advertising on social media are no longer perceived as the result of solely marketers’ actions but are instead viewed as dynamic outcomes (Merz et al., 2009, Cheng & Khan, 2017). Hence, consumers can influence the advertising of the brand and other consumers’ consumption process through UGC (Halliday, 2016; Kim & Johnson, 2016, Cheng & Khan, 2017).

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