Abstract

Due to the contemporary globalized environment, business demands have become more dynamic and complex. Companies need to capture such demands to sustain and grow further in the market, for which various sources of information have been exploited. One of these is brand-related media. UGC from the media platform includes rich information on customer opinions and feedback for products and services. Recognizing the value of UGC, previous studies have proposed an approach to extract customer needs from media platforms. However, most of these studies have focused only on a single UGC platform, whereas diverse brand-related media exist and provide heterogeneous information. To address this issue, we develop a framework to evaluate the characteristics of brand-related UGC information and compare four different UGC media, including Amazon, ProQuest, Reddit, and YouTube, in terms of how rich they are in providing semantic, sentimental, and trend information based on a quantitative approach. The research results indicate that brand-related UGC media can have their own distinguishing features in the information they provide and thus need to be carefully adopted for market research. These findings offer meaningful implications for the use of brand-related UGC to identify innovation opportunities based on market needs.