Relevance of context of brand mentions in fiction to the contemporary brand values and target audience (the case of Nestlé in K. Chukovsky’s memoirs about A. Akhmatova)

Abstract

In the theory of brand management, the influence of brand mentions in fiction on the perception of a brand by the target audience remains unexplored. One position is based on the fact that any brand mentions are valuable, and the bigger the audience coverage of a literary source, the greater its value. Another approach is based on evaluation of the quality of audience of a literary work. The analysis of the contemporary readership of works created in the past centuries is a difficult task. This paper proposes an approach to analyze the value of brand mentions in literature from the perspective of quantitative semantics. The methodology includes the transformation of an array of words from a literary fragment and a text reflecting brand values, translated from the official website into vectors of frequencies of semantic groups of Roget’s Thesaurus. As a standard for comparison, the verbalization of the values of the target group was used. All three vectors were compared with each other in pairs according to the cosine proximity formula. The analysis was carried out on the example of the mention of one of Nestlé’s products in memoirs about Anna Akhmatova by K. Chukovsky. The standard target group was the contemporary Russian youth in the age of 14–23 years old. The study demonstrated that the values of the group are relatively distant from the context of mention. The semantic context of the literary fragment is different from Nestlé’s values and is further away from the values of the young people as compared to the postulated official brand values. This methodology can be useful for automatic or semi-automatic analysis of brand mentions in works of literature. The proposed approach can be developed and adapted for a deep context-dependent analysis of brand mentions in the media, social networks and transcripts of oral speech.