User-generated place brand equity on Twitter: The dynamics of brand associations in social media

Original Article

User-generated place brandequity on Twitter: The dynamicsof brand associations in socialmediaReceived (in revised form): 6th March 2014

Mikael Andéhnis a lecturer in the marketing department of the School of Business, Stockholm University. His research deals with consumerbehavior and the role played by associations with a meaning-laden place, such as a country, in the context of preferenceformation toward brands.

Azadeh Kazeminiaearned her PhD in Industrial Marketing from Luleå University of Technology in Sweden. Her research and scholarly interestsrevolve around various topics in consumer behavior including tourism marketing and pro-environmental behavior.

Andrea Lucarelliis a doctoral candidate at Stockholm University (Sweden). Andrea’s particular research interest lies in the consumption andbranding of territorial entities such as regions and cities, as well as in the consumption and branding of public and political entitiessuch as political parties and public organizations. Andrea adopts a socio-cultural research outlook, and in his work he draws frompolitical and spatial theories to research contemporary marketing phenomena.

Efe Sevinis a doctoral candidate at the School of International Service at American University and a doctoral researcher at the Center forResearch on Collaboratories and Technology Enhanced Learning Communities (COTELCO). He received his undergraduatedegree from the Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. He completed his graduate-level studies at Emerson College,Boston, and received his MA as a Fulbright Scholar. His research interests include strategic communication, computer-mediatedcommunication, non-traditional diplomacy, place branding, multi-method research and research methodologies.

ABSTRACT Social media provides a unique opportunity for brand analysis. The merefact that users create content andmessages through social media platformsmakes thedetailed monitoring of temporal variation in brand images possible. This research ana-lyzes data collected from a specific social media platform, Twitter, about the city ofStockholm over a 3-month period to analyze how social media could be conceptualizedas a new venue for place brand meaning formation, and to see how user-generatedcontent pertains to the issue of place brand equity. Using semantic and content ana-lyses, assemblages of place brand-related themes are explored. Subsequently, theseassemblages of themes are deconstructed at a conceptual level and then subjected tofrequency analysis, revealing an underlying typology based on characteristics of thetemporal variation of the various types of brand elements. These results are exploredon the basis of both how they apply to the understanding of content on social media ingeneral and how they apply to the online presence, or digital footprint, of place brands.Place Branding and Public Diplomacy (2014) 10, 132–144. doi:10.1057/pb.2014.8;published online 16 April 2014

Keywords: place branding; place brand equity; associations; Twitter; social media

Correspondence:Mikael AndéhnStockholms universitet, SE-106 91,Stockholm

© 2014 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1751-8040 Place Branding and Public Diplomacy Vol. 10, 2, 132–144www.palgrave-journals.com/pb/

http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/pb.2014.8

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INTRODUCTIONBranding has transcended to such a point whereit is perhaps better understood as a societalphenomenon rather than a practice that isexclusive to managerial contexts (Kornberger,2010, p. xi). In contemporary societies, it iscommon to talk about brands and branding evenin the context of ideology, political parties, peopleand places, in addition to the traditional brands ofgoods, firms and services (Keller, 2002, p. 151). Inthe case of places, brands refer to the meaningattributed as a result of dynamic communicationand negotiation processes (Sevin, 2011).Contemporary communication technologies haveintroduced new means for attributing suchmeanings to places. Specifically, social mediaoutlets have become important platforms throughwhich place brands can be communicated,negotiated, projected and assessed with few spatialor temporal constraints.

As Smith et al (2012) argue, volatility, orpropensity for change, has been suggested as acentral characteristic of brands as they manifest insocial media. Social media is predominantly basedon interaction between users, and thusincorporates customer input into the projectedbrands (Smith et al, 2012). Consequently, the waybrands manifest themselves on social media couldand should be conceptualized as ‘user-generated’because brands become the product of howconsumers, or users, project them in various socialmedia platforms. Thus, the content andassociations attributed to brands are generatedaccording to an operational logic that differsfundamentally from that of traditional mediaoutlets and the highly limited consumer-to-brandinteraction that such traditional mediaaccommodate.

As brands, places are endowed with acharacteristic that pertains to their value – their‘equity’. A brand’s equity has long been consideredto be an imperative concern of contemporarymarketing management practice (Barwise, 1993;Shocker et al, 1994; Ambler, 2003), as well asacademic research in marketing (Keller andLehmann, 2006). In the context of placemanagement, brand equity, or place brand equity,is a relatively new concept. There have been some

attempts to explain how brand equity applies toplaces (for example, Zenker, 2011; Lucarelli,2012). However, these attempts tend to stay at aconceptual level and do not necessarily includeempirical validation. In addition, the conceptualmodels offered by Zenker (2011) and Lucarelli(2012), while valuable contributions to the field,have not taken the transient and dynamic nature ofplace brands into consideration. The changingnature of place brands is a factor that has beensuggested to hold pivotal relevance for theunderstanding of place brands by several authors(cf. Kavaratzis and Hatch, 2013; Giovanardi et al,2013; Warnaby and Medway, 2013).

This article offers an approach that grasps thedynamic nature of place brand equity. The analysisof user-generated content of a particular city brand(Stockholm) maps the way different stakeholdersco-construct the equity of the city brand via aspecific social media platform, Twitter. Twitterhere serves as an example venue in which the basisof place brand equity – meaning attributed to aplace – is generated by the users. The article makesboth methodological and theoretical contributionsto the place branding literature. The researchpresents a unique framework to analyze user-generated place brand equity by utilizing thepermanence of brand associations. Moreover,consumer brand equity understandings, theoriesand concepts from social media studies areincorporated into place branding studies.

EXPLICATING BRAND EQUITYBrand equity is widely regarded as constituting apivotal factor in market success, and researchershave long tried to define exactly what factorscome to determine the equity of a brand. Thereare several conceptualizations and definingelements of brand equity in the extant literature.Nevertheless, it is possible to divide all theparticular definitions and models into three maincategories: (i) managerial marketing (for example,Aaker, 1996; Kapferer, 1997), which focuses onthe definition of the properties of brand equity;(ii) consumer-oriented marketing (for example,Keller, 1993), which focuses on brand equity asperceived attributes; and finally (iii) financial

Brand equity in a tourism destination

133© 2014 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1751-8040 Place Branding and Public Diplomacy Vol. 10, 2, 132–144

model (for example, Simon and Sullivan, 1993),which approaches brand equity in the context offirm asset evaluation.

In the marketing literature, brand equity is mostcommonly discussed in the context of consumerperceptions. Thus, brand equity is defined as abrand’s ability to serve as a competitive advantageby conveying additional value to the ‘branded’ asopposed to ‘non-branded’ product, service orcorporation. Brand equity operates as a driver ofperceived quality, consumer loyalty and consumersatisfaction, as well as allowing for premium priceswithout incurring a linear trade-off in sales (Aaker,1996). Simply stated, superior brand equityrepresents the height of a sustainable competitiveadvantage (DeChernatony, 2009).

A quasi-standard conceptualization in themarketing literature defines brand equity as beingderived from the perceptions of the brand held byits potential consumers. This approach is oftenreferred to as customer- (or consumer-) basedbrand equity (Keller, 1993). As the name suggests,brand equity is the result of the aggregate sum ofassociations held toward the brand in the mind ofthe consumer (Keller, 1993), resulting in asummative judgment, or an attitude toward thebrand (Fishbein and Ajzen, 1975; Ajzen, 2001).This suggests that brand equity is the outcome of,and the same as, the aggregate meaning attributedto a brand.

The associations themselves can be thought of as‘cues’ (Zeithaml, 1988), or stimuli, with evaluativepertinence (Bagozzi, 1986), for quality, or value,which are weighed together to form an overallappraisal of an object’s desirability (Petty et al,1997; Bargh, 2002). Much of this attitudeformation process is thought to occur beyond theconscious deliberation of the consumer, and reliesprimarily on the unconscious processes by whichthe information is collected, analyzed and boileddown to a judgment or an attitude (Whittlesea andWright, 1997; Bargh, 2002; Fitzsimons et al, 2002;Djiksterhuis, 2004). The basis of brand equity inKeller’s (1993) conceptualization, the associationsthat consumers have about a brand, is ultimatelythe result of information the consumer hasperceived and stored in their memory. This makesany ‘moment of experience’ (Prahalad and

Ramaswamy, 2004) related to a brand a means bywhich brand equity is formed. The complexity ofmanaging this process has been a common topic inthe marketing literature for quite some time(Shocker et al, 1994), and despite the high volumeof studies on this particular process, given thecomplex nature of brand equity, further studies,especially outside the traditional brandingcontexts, are required.

BRAND EQUITY AND PLACESAlthough branding terminology and practice wereonce confined to the realm of firms, products andservices, they are now also being applied to people(Lair et al, 2005; Shepherd, 2005), cities (Lucarelliand Berg, 2011) and even nations (Anholt, 2009).The branding of places is an area that has recentlygarnered significant attention in the academicliterature (cf. Lucarelli and Brorström, 2013), aswell as increasing attention from professionalsinvolved in the management and governance ofmunicipalities, cities, tourist destinations, regionsand even countries (Anholt, 2009). As the practiceof branding has permeated the new subject ofplace marketing, the issue of brand equity hasfollowed.

In the contemporary place branding literature,brand equity is predominantly implied, with only ahandful of studies explicitly focusing on the topic.For example, Zenker and Martin (2011) highlightthe need to further study the concept of placebrand equity by arguing that the relatively lowvolume of research dealing with place brandequity was due mainly to the lack of standardindications and measurements of this concept.Within the place branding literature, even if thereare few studies dealing directly with place brandequity, many adopt different propositions on howto incorporate brand equity. Some scholars, forexample, adopt a marketing managerialconceptualization of brand equity pointing towardthe importance of sport teams for city brand equityin leveraging economic development andstrengthening feelings of community (Sparveroand Chalip, 2007). Others, such as Papadopoulosand Heslop (2002) and Jacobsen (2009, 2012),suggest that investor-based brand equity is an

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134 © 2014 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1751-8040 Place Branding and Public Diplomacy Vol. 10, 2, 132–144

important factor in evaluating the equity of placebrands. Similarly, it is possible to adopt aconsumer-oriented approach to equity, as wasdone in the case of the evaluation of the brandAustralia as a destination (Pike et al, 2010) and ofthe equity measurement of Las Vegas and AtlanticCity (Boo et al, 2009).

The common denominator for all these studiesis the partial use of the evidence coming from theinterdisciplinary literature of city and placebranding, and an over-reliance on models andevaluation schemes based on the traditionalbranding approaches. Zenker, in recent attemptsto fill the gap in the literature (Zenker, 2011;Zenker and Martin, 2011), has introduced adichotomy of citizens versus brand influenced bythe dichotomy of consumer versus product. Theauthors presented an evaluative modelemphasizing the importance of having a mix ofmeasurement methods that can encompass boththe tangible and the intangible aspects of placebrands. Zenker (2011) also provides a typology ofcity brand categories. Following Zenker, Lucarelli(2012) has attempted to unravel city brand equityby suggesting that city brand equity is composed ofa set of different elements that require differentmeasurement tools and whose impacts differ innature.

Both Zenker’s (2011) and Lucarelli’s (2012)studies have been instrumental in paving the wayfor a more complex and field-specificunderstanding of place brand equity. Yet, theconceptual models offered by these scholarsrequire further empirical testing and do notnecessarily take the ever-changing nature ofperceptions and the inherent dynamicity of placebrands (Giovanardi et al, 2013) into consideration.In contrast to previous place brand equity studies(for example, Pike et al, 2010; Jacobsen, 2012), thepresent study takes the dynamic nature of placebrands as a defining characteristic of places(cf. Kavaratzis and Hatch, 2013; Giovanardi et al,2013; Warnaby and Medway, 2013). Social mediais seen as a venue in which this dynamicity of placebrands is evident, as place brands take on a lifebeyond managerial control and users have thepower and opportunity to provide content andmeaning.

USER-GENERATED BRANDEQUITY AND THE NEW SOCIALMEDIASocial media changes the ways through which therelationships between consumer and brand areconfigured. Social media allows for anunprecedented level of user involvement inactivities geared toward the formulation of brandmeaning (Kornberger, 2010, p. 153). Indeed, thisuser involvement occurs to such a degree that itmay be reasonable to refer to the content of thismedia venue as primarily user-, or consumer-,generated. The new social media, such as Twitter,can also be seen as an example of a venue, or anextension of what can be called a Habermasianpublic sphere (Habermas, 1989), as it provides anarena in which various types of users, such asindividual residents, civil society groups and placemanagers, can interact.

In the context of brands the nature of socialmedia presents challenges and opportunities inacademic and managerial settings. For managers,social media constitutes a means by which controlover the brand is lost, and arguably more so than inany other setting in which brands are attributedwith meaning. In the older iteration of internetmedia, brand managers used to possess the powerto produce, manage and project messages abouttheir cities (cf. Florek et al, 2006). In contrast, socialmedia not only allows users to appropriate brandsand shape their meaning through unintended use,but also provides users an opportunity to projectalternative meaning of brands to large numbers ofother consumers (Pongsakornrungsilp andSchroeder, 2011). This new situation in whichbrands are more directly co-created by the users,or consumers, is argued to constitute a uniqueopportunity for firms to ‘employ’ consumers intheir innovation and brand-building processes(Arvidsson, 2005; Kornberger, 2010).

For scholars attempting to study brands, socialmedia provides a great opening in that it allows fora detailed dissection of meaning attributed tobrands. Social media has changed considerably theway basic communication processes are modeled,as the audience is no longer a passive recipient ofthe messages but rather wants to actively respond,participate and create content and messages.



For this reason the word ‘media’ in new socialmedia may be confounding, as one may be led toreduce this new technology to a simplebroadcasting tool. Traditional media platformsenable users to send one-way messages, but socialmedia encourages two-way communication andnetworking, often simultaneously. In other words,social media platforms facilitate interactionbetween users, and, in addition to the enabling ofbroadcasting information in a highly effective way,communication can now easily turn into apolyphonic dialogue.

The individual social media platforms carrytheir own logic of communication and expression.Beyond the fundamental characteristics ofinteraction and user-generated context, it is notpossible to posit generalized arguments aboutspecific platforms. In fact, as Smith et al suggest(2012), the various social media outlets, such asFacebook and Twitter, have different operationallogics and as a result generate diverging forms ofuser-generated brand content. Twitter allows itsusers to write ‘tweets’, that is, short messages of upto 140 characters, on any subject they want and toshare these with the rest of the world. Users canalso build up relations by ‘following’ each other,that is, subscribing to each other’s tweets.The structure of tweets provides two otherpossibilities to connect with other users. First,users can include the name of another user in theform of a ‘mention’ (including an acknowledge-ment of another user), ‘retweet’ (sharing anotheruser’s tweet – usually starting with RT@username) or reply (answering back to anotheruser’s tweet). Second, users can include‘hashtags’. Hashtags are words that start witha ‘#’ character and are used to denote topics onTwitter. As it is possible to search for tweetsthrough hashtags, by including a hashtag in atweet users categorize their messages and makethem more easily accessible by the public(Small, 2011).

In its essence, Twitter is a novel communicationtool making it possible to disseminate messages andcreate new social relations simultaneously ( Jansenet al, 2009). There are two different opportunitiesto communicate with target audiences on Twitter.First, Twitter can be seen as a cost-effective way to

broadcast messages (or one-way communication,one-to-many communication). Users can sendmessages to their followers and to the generalpublic through search options. Second, Twitterenables users to interact with their audiences (ortwo-way communication, one-to-onecommunication). Therefore, it is important tonote that the audience on Twitter is determinedby social relations. In a traditional understanding ofmass media communication, a cascading flow ofinformation from official news resources to medianetworks and to publics is expected (Entman,2003, 2008). There is no direct relationshipbetween news, or content, resources – whether itbe place branding campaigns, cities or individuals –and target audiences. The boundaries of audiences– or the extent to which the message will spread –depends on the given media network’s viewership.However, on Twitter the information flow isbased on the characteristics of the user’s socialnetwork (Chakraborty et al, 2010).

METHODThe data was collected using a script that collectedall tweets containing the word ‘Stockholm’ over a3-month period, from 2 May 2013 to 1 August2013, with new tweets being logged ininsequences spanning approximately 4 days. Thisprocedure generated a total of 73 763 tweetscontaining the word ‘Stockholm’. The data wasprocessed in order to remove all tweets not writtenin English. The data collected from Twitterincluded a language code for every tweet.Therefore, tweets with different codes thanEnglish were removed from the data set. Theremaining English tweets (a total of 33 962 tweets)were analyzed to plot the words and conceptsaccording to their co-occurrence. The analysisfocused solely on tweets written in English tobetter capture brand-related themes created byusers from various countries and regions given thelanguage’s status as a modern-day lingua franca.

The text corpus collected was subjected tocontent analysis, using two major approaches:thematic analysis and semantic analysis. Contentanalysis studies in the realm of place branding havemainly used thematic content analysis whereby the

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frequency of the occurance of words is consideredas the basis for further analysis (Hankinson, 2004;Hanna and Rowley, 2008). However, thematicanalysis has been suggested to be inadequatewithout consideration of how the words arelocated and connected to each other (Roony,2005). Therefore, the research team chose to useLeximancer software, which enables data miningto detect not only the key concepts in a corpus butalso how these concepts are semanticallyinterrelated (Roony, 2005). Using wordfrequency and co-occurrence as a basis for analysis,Leximancer conducts thematic and semanticanalyses simultaneously (Roony, 2005), and henceensures that a comprehensive take of the brandassociations is captured. Leximancer proved to beinstrumental in producing co-occurrence matricesof concepts and in identifying a thesaurus of wordsthat are closely related to the concept, therebygenerating semantic or definitional content aroundthe concept (Roony, 2005). Leximancer is afrequently used research tool in linguistics (Smith,2003); our study introduces the software to theplace branding domain.

The final output of this analysis process was aconceptual map ‘display[ing] all the ideas of thegroup relative to the topic at hand [to show thatideas] are related to each other and, optionally, [toshow] which ideas are more relevant, important,or appropriate’ (Trochim, 1989, p. 2). This mapcan be viewed as an assemblage of conceptsorganized in themes that provide a pictorialrepresentation of groups’ thinking (Trochim,1989). Conceptual maps produced by Leximancerportray the themes and concepts in the form ofcircles and dots, whereby large circles in theconceptual maps represent key themes from adocument and dots represent individual conceptsor words. The relative position of the circles anddots, as well as their distance from each other,demonstrates the strength of the semantic linksamong those concepts in the text. This means thatwhen two concepts are close together or overlapon the map, they have close semantic links(Campbell et al, 2011). As evidenced by previousstudies (Campbell et al, 2011), Leximancer entails ahigh level of reliability and reproducibility(Roony, 2005).

Leximancer maps identified a number ofconcepts and allowed for the classification of theirinterrelation. This classification provided a basis fordetermining which concepts would be subjectedto further analysis. In addition to the conceptsidentified, additional concepts found in the datathought to be relevant to Stockholm were addedto the frequency analysis. The selection of theseconcepts was based on their fit to categories ofwhat has been purposed to serve as brand elementsfor places by, for instance, Lucarelli (2012) andZenker (2011).

The data set was divided into 23 time segmentseach spanning approximately 4 days. As thenumber of tweets containing the word‘Stockholm’ varied dramatically over time, thefrequency of co-occurrences of the variousconcepts was normalized by dividing the score foreach construct by the total number of tweets ineach time frame. This score is referred to as the‘normalized score’ in the rest of the article. Thisprocedure generated a data set that enabled theidentification of fluctuations in the frequency ofco-occurrence of any of the concepts withStockholm over the 23 time segments.

The frequency analysis served the purpose ofallowing for a high-resolution illustration of howco-occurrence with ‘Stockholm’ varied over timefor each examined concept. This in turn allowedfor the detection of the degree of temporaltransience/permanence for each concept in itscapacity as a brand element of the city ofStockholm.

RESULTSIn the following section, the results of semanticand content analyses are discussed. In eachcategory, the most frequent concepts wereidentified and merged with concepts with whichthey had significant semantic overlap. They werethen plotted as diagrams that demonstrated theirfrequency of co-occurrence with the word‘Stockholm’. These concepts can be thought of asthe most pervasive brand elements projected ontoTwitter during the time period examined. Theconceptual map is illustrated in Figure 1.



Five major themes (represented by circles inFigure 1) emerged from the analysis ofco-occurrence with the word ‘Stockholm’:Stockholm, Stockholm syndrome,1 Sweden,ABBA and weekend. The first theme(the big central circle including the biggest doton the concept map) involves the conceptsthat in one way or another relate to Stockholm(as a city). The conversations revolve arounddaily life issues, whether, traveling to orworking in Stockholm, expressing feelingtoward the city either as a home or a traveldestination. This theme also involves conceptssuch as concert, music, summer and weekendthat, along with the themes of ‘live’ and ‘Tiesto’,primarily relate to the concerts and live musicevents that were held in Stockholm over aspecific time period:

Loving these hikes upon mountain sides, with@tiesto #clublife Stockholm in good company.This place is amazing!

The second theme is ‘Stockholm syndrome’;participants have used the term as a metaphor to

refer to various addictions or obsessive behaviors invarious contexts. This is well presented in thefollowing tweets:

Dear internet, I love you madly and deeply, butsometimes I wonder if its not in a StockholmSyndrome kind of way…

I got the Stockholm Syndrome, EverywhereI turn I see places where we fell in love.

The third theme, Sweden, which includesconcepts such as Swedish, work, tonight,tomorrow and days, emerged from conversationsthat, although they are related to Stockholm, aremore directly referring to Sweden as a country or adistinct identity. Participants talk about their tripto Sweden for different purposes and try to explaintheir experiences of Swedish culture and places. Ascan be observed from the map, this theme is close(and thus more semantically related) to the themesof ‘ABBA’, ‘travel’ and ‘weekend’ that representthe travel-related discussions. For instance, thetheme ‘ABBA’ apparently connects to the ABBAmuseum inauguration and the tours of Stockholmplanned by visitors to the museum.

Figure 1: The concept map of tweets co-occurring with Stockholm over the period May-July 2013.

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Holidays in Sweden: Be your own DancingQueen at | | Abba’s museum in Stockholm.

There is some news; A guided tour calledABBA – The Walk will take place in Stockholmfrom May 19, 2011.

These results represent an assemblage of differentsemantic and content-related concepts that resideat a more macro level. The present analysisidentifies different themes as assemblages ofconcepts, with the goal of identifying references tosubstantive concepts. At a more macro level, it ispossible to see how the substantive themes aresimilar to those identified in earlier theoreticalbrand element studies carried out by Lucarelli(2012) and Zenker (2011).

At a micro level, the individual concepts wereanalyzed with the purpose of identifying how theyco-occurred with Stockholm over time. Thisfrequency analysis allowed for the detection oftemporal variation and by extrapolation also of the

transience/permanence of each concept in itscapacity as a brand element of Stockholm,addressing the variability of place brands suggestedby some authors to constitute a crucial gap in theliterature to date (Giovanardi et al, 2013; Kavaratzisand Hatch, 2013; Warnaby and Medway, 2013).

The results of the frequency analysis areillustrated below. Figure 2 shows, in the upperpane, the summative normalized scoresacross time segments for 14 of the co-occurringconcepts. The lower pane shows thenormalized frequency by time segment forthe five most frequently co-occurring conceptsor words.

The images in Figure 2 show that two co-occurring words break away from the pack interms of their frequency: ‘Syndrome’ and‘Sweden/Swedish’ are concepts that have highmeans, and while their frequencies varysignificantly over time they co-occur morefrequently with Stockholm during the studied

Figure 2: Upper panel: Means and standard deviation of 21 concepts co-occurring with the word ‘Stockholm’ during thestudied time; Sweden/Swedish demarcates the sum of the mentions of these two concepts. Lower panel: Normalizedfrequency of the five most common co-occurring concepts over time.



time period than any other concept. Numerousother concepts also consistently co-occurwith ‘Stockholm’, albeit with a lower frequency.Table 1 lists the total frequencies, the meanper time segment and the standard deviationacross time segments for the normalizedTwitter data.

The frequency table adds a component to theunderstanding of Stockholm’s Twitter presence. Inorder to quantify temporal variation of the variousconcepts, the standard deviations (σ) and the means(x) were compared, and the fraction of the meanthrough the standard deviation was used to generatea tentative typology of concepts in terms oftransience/permanence. These scores for each of theconstructs are displayed in Table 1 (first column onthe right). This procedure revealed two categories ofconcepts. The concepts ‘ABBA’, ‘Museum’,‘Bieber’, ‘Pride’ and ‘Rihanna’ all attain scores of lessthan 0.7, suggesting a high level of transience.‘Syndrome’ and ‘Sweden/Swedish’ both receivescores in excess of 2.0, which, in turn, suggests ahigh level of permanence of these concepts in termsof co-occurrence with ‘Stockholm’. The rest of theconcepts attain scores between these two extremes.In the following section the question of what thistypology represents will be explicated.

DISCUSSIONTwitter is one of many social media outlets inwhich brands are projected, reflected andconstructed. Like all of these outlets, it has its owndistinct logic of operation, nature and content(Smith et al, 2012). The results of the present studysuggest that user-generated brand equity onTwitter is characterized by a particular type ofmanifestation of a brand and its associations. Theseresults can also be taken to demonstrate thetypically highly volatile and changing nature ofbrands and brand association as they are mademanifest in the arena of expression that Twitterprovides.

The study suggests that Twitter presents anotherparticularity that is highly relevant in the contextof understanding, and perhaps managing, brands –including place brands. This particularity lies in theexceptionally high temporal resolution in whichuser-generated content can be tracked andanalyzed. Tweets can be logged not only in 4-daysegments, as done in the present study, but in5-second intervals if necessary. This high level oftemporal resolution offers unique opportunities inthe context of brand research as the implications ofcertain actions, as they manifest on Twitter, can betracked virtually in real time. It follows thatassociations, forming the basis of consumer-basedbrand equity for places (Keller, 1993), can beobserved as soon as they appear, and that anyfluctuation in what is associated with andprojected to a place can be tracked very closely.

This particularity has been used in the presentstudy for the purposes of generating a tentativetypology of place brand associations based on theirtemporal characteristics. Through the use of a verysimple algorithm the degree of transience orpermanence of concepts that co-occur withStockholm has been quantified. The results of thisprocedure have revealed three separate categoriesof place brand associations. First, the highlytransient ‘event’-concepts ‘ABBA’, ‘Museum’,‘Bieber’, ‘Rihanna’ and ‘Pride’ that attain scoreslower than 0.7 in the classification, for brief flashesof time, become highly prominent associationswith ‘Stockholm’. But this influence is fleeting,and only lasts for a highly limited time framebefore it dissipates. Nevertheless, these Twitter

Table 1: Frequency table, the total normalized score, means( x̄ ) and standard deviations (σ) per time segment(ts) forconcepts co-occurring with ‘Stockholm’

Concept Total (N) x Nð Þ=ts σ Nð Þ=ts x=σ

Sweden/Swedish 3.528 0.153 0.051 3.000Syndrome 2.486 0.108 0.050 2.160Bieber 0.929 0.040 0.072 0.556Summer 0.691 0.030 0.038 0.789Music 0.683 0.030 0.033 0.909City 0.635 0.028 0.012 2.333People 0.425 0.018 0.010 1.800Amazing 0.385 0.017 0.016 1.063London 0.367 0.016 0.010 1.600Visit 0.354 0.015 0.015 1.000Work 0.343 0.015 0.014 1.071Friends 0.329 0.014 0.014 1.000Concert 0.299 0.013 0.016 0.813Trip 0.270 0.012 0.011 1.091ABBA 0.267 0.012 0.031 0.387Museum 0.253 0.011 0.028 0.393Beautiful 0.252 0.011 0.006 1.833Rihanna 0.181 0.008 0.028 0.286Weekend 0.178 0.008 0.006 1.333Pride 0.173 0.008 0.013 0.615Capital 0.077 0.003 0.004 0.750

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events, corresponding to the Justin Bieber andRihanna concerts in Stockholm, the StockholmGay Pride festival and the ABBA museuminauguration, are highly prominent presences intheir own small slices of time.

The second category, the most consistentassociations scoring in excess of 2.0 in theclassification, represented here by ‘Sweden’ and‘Swedish’, which were merged due to their largesemantic overlap, and ‘Syndrome’, representsconcepts that are of a more persistent nature. Infact, one may say that these two concepts are theonly ones that are consistent staples of Stockholm’stweeted identity. The rest of the concepts, such as‘ABBA’ and ‘Bieber’, co-occur with neither theintensity of the ‘events’ nor the persistence of the‘consistent’ concepts that share Stockholm’sTwitterspace.

These findings have two distinct aspects. First,they provide some guidance to anyone whowishes to take a first step toward understandinghow place brand meaning can manifest itself onTwitter. Second, they provide an example of howassociation can be projected and recreated in textor speech acts. One characteristic of ‘new media’ isthe projection and reflection of events that occurin a highly limited temporal space. In the case ofTwitter this temporality is particularlypronounced, not only because Twitter, as a microblog, is a venue in which people can expressthemselves with a default low level of directtextual interaction (the messages are typically notdirected to any particular person, although thepossibility of directing messages in this way doesexist) as well as a low level of commitment, butalso because the format is highly conductive foruse with mobile platforms, arguably more so thanany other form of social media. This means thatexpression is rarely further away than one’s pocketand is thus potentially immediate. As a result,Twitter offers a particular means of studying howmeaning is materialized through the formulationof text in a spontaneous, organic and highlytemporally precise manner.

In the present study, the impact of the ‘event’concepts is illuminated through clarity andaccuracy, and thus their temporality can beascertained. At a glance, a summative frequency

analysis of tweets mentioning Stockholm maysuggest a surprising pre-occupation with teen popidol Justin Bieber. But, through a deeper look atthe temporal distribution of Tweets, one mayeasily discern that ‘Justin Bieber’ comes todominate Stockholm’s Twitterspace for a highlydelimited time period. Like a lightning bolt, thisinfluence is exceptionally noticeable while it ispresent but lasts for what is less than a moment inthe life of the brand of the city of Stockholm. Thisstrict temporal delimitation means that in theirsolitude every individual ‘event’-concept arguablyfails to attain significant impact over a longer time,but in a given time frame it is likely that some formof ‘event’ is present. This means that it may bedifficult to decouple any entity on Twitter from‘event’-type concepts in temporally delimitedsets of data and thus to attain an accuraterepresentation of what concepts co-occur with agiven entity over a longer time frame.

Furthermore, the summative influence of‘events’ is an addition to the visibility, or presence,of the concept of Stockholm on Twitter. In thisway Twitter illustrates one way in which placesand events can be thought of as operating intandem: events ascribe meaning to places andallow places a means to attain and retain theirrelevance through the infusion of visibility into theplace. The place brand in turn allows for easyascription of meaning, and emplacement, onto andof the event.

Conceptualizing brand equity as associations asKeller (1993) suggests and analyzing co-occurringconcepts on Twitter highlights an interestingexample of how semantic overlap can be drawnfrom an intersection of representation in language.For instance, the fact that the place ‘Stockholm’ isa component of the concept ‘Stockholmsyndrome’ may at a glance appear as if it doesnot really say anything about the city ofStockholm. But the understanding of ‘Stockholm’,as projected on Twitter, is understood inconjunction with the concept of ‘Stockholmsyndrome’ at the very least by judging by thefrequency reproduced as a component of theconcept of ‘Stockholm syndrome’. This suggeststhat even though ‘Stockholm syndrome’ may bereferenced without direct intended pertinence to



the city of Stockholm, the concept still, throughan overlap in designation, infers meaning to thecity of Stockholm indirectly. In this situation theshared representation offered by the use of theword ‘Stockholm’ can prompt an association thatcan come to transcend mere designation andcome to hold the potential of inferring meaningto the city.

CONCLUSIONSBrands are formed in many different venues, andthe new media technologies such as social mediaplatforms offer interesting challenges, as theydestabilize managerial control over brands astraditionally conceptualized (cf. Kornberger,2010). These new venues of brand formation allhave unique mechanisms and ‘personalities’ (Smithet al, 2012), and the present study suggests thatthese particularities constitute an important area ofstudy if the means by which brand formationoccurs are to be understood. This study argues thatTwitter is not only an interesting way ofunderstanding place brands, but also that itoperates with its own logic that, especially givenhow widespread the use of this platform is, in itselfconstitutes an interesting topic for further study.

However, Twitter is just one of many newsocial media sites, and while a place’s digitalpresence is becoming an increasingly importantmeans of understanding its projection, social mediain its entirety is in itself just one among manyvenues in which consumer-based brand equity isexpressed and conveyed. Twitter is one venue thatis particularly interesting, as the form a brand takeson Twitter is arguably at the same time asymptomatic expression of the consumer-basedbrand equity of the brand writ large while alsoformative, as tweets are read and thus contribute toforming the perceptions of their audience.

In the context of firm brands, consumer-basedbrand equity, as construed by Keller (1993, 2002),has come to constitute the dominant logic forapproaching brand performance. In this article wehave presented an analysis of how consumer-basedbrand equity is projected onto and reflected in aparticular arena – the popular social media siteTwitter. This setting offers a unique opportunity

to study brand associations, the basis of brandequity (Keller, 1993), as Twitter posts, or ‘tweets’,are at the same time reflective of perceptions heldby the poster while reproducing these perceptionsby their projection into public view.

Places and cities are, according to Tuan (1975),an entanglement of different meanings that areproduced in the eye and mind of the beholder.Similarly, place brands, it has been argued, arealso produced in the eye and mind of thebeholder (for example, Sevin, 2011; Zenker,2011), but are also composed of both hard andsoft factors (Giovanardi, 2012), with differentand entangled identities (Kalandides, 2011) andwith different stakeholders involved in themeaning production process (Kavaratzis, 2012).These meanings in turn can be thought ofas relevant in various commercial contexts,making it hard to argue against the idea thatplace and city brand can be thought of ashaving ‘equity’ (Lucarelli, 2012), but also, byfollowing much of the consumer-orientedliterature on place branding, that such brand equityis changing in relation to who is perceiving(cf. Zenker, 2011). The present study expands theknowledge of place brands by suggesting a way toframe place brand equity as it occurs in social mediavia a typologization based on the degree ofpermanence of brand associations.

The present study constitutes an attempt ataddressing recent debates on place brand theorythat emphasized the spatial and temporaldynamicity of place brands (cf. Kavaratzis andHatch, 2013; Giovanardi et al, 2013). In fact, theresults maintain that place brands can beunderstood as phenomena in continuous change,and that an important means of advancingknowledge of how place brands take on theirmeaning lies in the study of their temporaldimensions, which to date have not beenadequately accounted for through empiricalresearch. Furthermore, the present analysis hasprovided an account of the means by whichdifferent stakeholders (users) act as the main sourceof the associations, content and meaning thatconstitute the basis of place brand equity.

The temporal dynamic of place brands canarguably only be captured if one is able to tap into

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how the meaning and content of, as well asassociations with, brands are generated by theirusers (cf. Burmann, 2010). Tapping into user-generated brand equity also offers a benefit totraditional attitude measurement, which is thenorm in much of the literature on brand equityand branding as it has been applied to the realm ofplaces. In contrast to traditional approaches, a user-generated brand equity approach – while notnecessarily accurately defining an objective brand‘identity’ – offers a way in which equity can beobserved without the researcher exerting any kindof influence. This particularity is due to the factthat user-generated brand equity, as it ismanifested on, for instance, Twitter, constitutes anunprovoked or ‘natural’ manifestation of brands asusers, without being urged in any way, participatein the co-authoring of brand meaning.

Ultimately, Twitter provides a venue for theaccelerated integration between the previouslydichotomized producers and consumers of placebrand equity. This development makes evidentthe need to accommodate and account for how abrand is co-authored in a dialogue. Place brandmanagers should approach places and their brandsas fragmented phenomena over which they cannotexert managerial control in the traditional sense,highlighting the need for building a sense ofmembership to a brand community, by sustaininga dialogue with the users (Yan, 2011; Sevin, 2013).Because of this, place branding should beunderstood not only as a negotiation processbetween places and target audiences (Sevin, 2011),but also as a new platform that can function as amedium that allows individual users to cometogether to create content and community aroundthe common point of reference the place brandprovides.

NOTE1 Stockholm syndrome is a psychological

phenomenon in which hostages expressempathy and sympathy and have positivefeelings towards their captors. Named after theNorrmalmstorg robbery of Kreditbanken atNorrmalmstorg in Stockholm, Sweden(see Namnyak et al, 2008).

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User-generated place brand equity on Twitter: The dynamics of brand associations in social media