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Online consumer reviews have become an increasingly important source of information for both consumers (i.e. about whether to buy) and marketers (i.e. about product strengths and weaknesses). However, online consumer reviews are unstructured and unsystematic in nature, making interpretation of these reviews an enormous challenge. The current paper sheds light on a particular methodology that can be used to investigate what consumers say about companies, brands or products. Consumer reviews of the four best-selling games available on Apple's App Store were compiled. Leximancer, a content analysis package, was used to compare comments from users who provided games with a five-star rating versus a one-star rating. Results from the Leximancer analysis reveal the most common themes and concepts that consumers use to describe their experience with these games. Specifically, five-star reviewers describe games as fun, awesome, amazing and addictive; one-star reviewers describe games as boring, easy and stupid. Additionally, negative reviews include themes regarding the presence of ads, technological difficulties and value. Future research should explore how consumers and marketers use this information.

Purpose Online brand communities provide a wealth of insights about how consumers perceive and talk about a brand, rather than what the firm communicates about the brand. The purpose of this paper is to understand whether the brand personality of an online brand community, rather than of the brand itself, can be deduced from the online communication within that brand community. Design/methodology/approach The paper is empirical in nature. The authors use community-generated content from eight online brand communities and perform content analysis using the text analysis software Diction. The authors employ the five brand personality dictionaries (competence, excitement, ruggedness, sincerity and sophistication) from the Pitt et al. (2007) dictionary source as the basis for the authors’ analysis. Findings The paper offers two main contributions. First, it identifies two types of communities: those focusing on solving functional problems that consumers might encounter with a firm’s offering and those focusing on broader engagement with the brand. Second, the study serves as a blueprint that marketers can adopt to analyze online brand communities using a computerized approach. Such a blueprint is beneficial not only to analyze a firm’s own online brand community but also that of competitors, thus providing insights into how their brand stacks up against competitor brands. Originality/value This is the first paper examining the nature of online brand communities by means of computerized content analysis. The authors outline a number of areas that marketing scholars could explore further based on the authors analysis. The paper also highlights implications for marketers when establishing, managing, monitoring and analyzing online brand communities.

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Social media has changed both the way in which organizations and their brands interact with their customers and the way in which business gets done. Brands are attempting to utilize social media to reach existing customers, gain new ones and build or maintain credibility and reputation. More importantly, brands need to measure their visibility in the most popular social media relative to that of competitors. This study describes a tool for collecting brand visibility information by looking at the visibility of various South African university brands and their relative positioning from a social media perspective. Correspondence analysis is then used to portray the various university brands in a multi-dimensional space so that they can be contrasted with each other in terms of their visibility in social media. The findings indicate that South African university brands are not distinctly positioned in social media and that none of them seems to currently have a concerted strategy for engaging its stakeholders in a particular social media. This means that there are both opportunities for those who manage these brands, and also threats to these institutions for taking a laissez fair attitude to social media in these times when social media are coming to dominate the Internet in particular and media in general.