Mapping a Brand’s Contexts: iPhone Antennagate

In the digital world, brands are defined by the way people talk about them. The challenge is how to represent these “conversational contexts” visually.

Consumer conversation shapes the contexts in which brands are perceived. For example, many of us intuitively know that iPhone has a large “apps” context, while Nike will be discussed in relation to “running.”

We have been working on ways to represent this idea visually in a meaningful way that’s also easy to understand. The result is the map shown above, which illustrates iPhone conversation from 28 June to 4 July. The circles were determined as follows:

• Context name: The circles are labeled with the conversational context they represent.
• Size of each circle: We used our measure of sociability for each context to determine each circle’s diameter.
• Closeness to centre: The distance from the centre of the map represents how relevant a context is to the overall topic, in this case, “iPhone”. To get an idea of relevance, we measured the average distance in words of the topic from the brand name (for example, how far away is the word “design” from the word “iPhone” on average).

Antennagate in maps

Our hypothesis is that the closer a topic is to the brand name, the more relevant it is to the brand. Have a look at the results we got applying this methodology to iPhone conversation at the height of the reception crisis last summer.

You’ll notice how the reception bubble grows bigger as a proportion of iPhone conversation, and moves closer towards the word ‘iPhone’ as it becomes more relevant:

We’re calling these Brand Context Maps, and have produced quite a few for internal research already. The iPhone maps above were based on a total sample of over a million comments collected over the summer.

We’re hopeful that this methodology can evolve to include new metrics, such as sentiment, and ultimately become a powerful way to visually understand what defines a brand, based on what the market place thinks at any time. Watch this space for more on Brand Context Maps soon. …