Brands, networks, communities: How brand names are wired in the mind

Brands can be defined as psychological constructs residing in our minds. By analyzing brand associations, we can study the mental constructs around them. In this paper, we study brands as parts of an associative network based on a word association database. We explore the communities–closely-knit groups in the mind–around brand names in this structure using two community detection algorithms in the Hungarian word association database ConnectYourMind. We identify brand names inside the communities of a word association network and explain why these brand names are part of the community. Several detected communities contain brand names from the same product category, and the words in these categories were connected either to brands in the category or to words describing the product category. Based on our findings, we describe the mental position of brand names. We show that brand knowledge, product knowledge and real word knowledge interact with each other. We also show how the meaning of a product category arises and how this meaning is related to brand meaning. Our results suggest that words sharing the same community with brand names can be used in brand communication and brand positioning.