Download or read book ESSAYS IN ADVERTISING MESSAGES, MASS MEDIA, AND PRODUCT POSITIONING. written by Jun Bum Kwon and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In my dissertation, I apply emerging big data methodologies to measure the effects of advertising content and detect potential product segments. First, I explore whether advertising messages can change the topics reported in mass media. Specifically, I examine whether Dove's real beauty campaign increased the incidence of real-beauty-related topics in newspapers. Using a topic model, I segment beauty-related topics and identify topics related to real beauty. The number of sentences labeled as real beauty topics increases during the campaign. While the Dove campaign's significant impact on real beauty topics around the time of the campaign holds even in newspapers without Unilever ads, the impact is larger in newspapers containing Unilever ads. Overall, this evidence is consistent with both a mass media's public service role and an advertiser pressure influencing mass media content. In my next study, joint work with Avi Goldfarb and Trevor Snider, I introduce a method for identifying potentially related products using topological data analysis (TDA). From both simulated and real consumer purchase data, I show that "loopy segments" in TDA can connect regionally separated local products through national products, while standard clustering methods such as hierarchical clustering cannot. Lastly, I test whether comparative advertising reposition rival brands closer together. Using Google Trends' aggregate consumer search data, I analyze Samsung's U.S. television comparative advertising campaign against Apple's iPhone. I count co-occurrence of searches for brand pairs (e.g. Samsung Apple) and their brand-product attributes (e.g. Samsung screen, Apple Screen), to respectively map brand and product space. I find that advertised rival brands become closer together in both brand and product spaces but not significant in product space. My results suggest that a lower share brand may benefit from comparative advertising against a market leader by forcing itself to be more considered alongside a market leader when consumers search brands.