Brand Communication in Twitter - a Case Study on Adidas

Krüger Nina, Stieglitz Stefan, Potthoff Tobias

Abstract

In recent years, communication in public social media increasingly affected enterprises. Internet users began to share information about products, brands, and companies. Research currently focuses on investigating this form of communication by using quantitative methods in order to get a better understanding of it and of its relevance for companies and society. However, little is known about how enterprises themselves spread information in social media and how stakeholders talk about brands and products. In our work, we investigate communication genres directed from stakeholder- to-stakeholder, from business-to-stakeholder, and from stakeholder-to-business. By doing this, we were able to broadly analyze the content of communication in social media. In our research, we focus on the company adidas, an international manufacturer of sports clothes. We concentrate on the awareness aspect and adapted a theoretical model in order to evaluate company- related communication in Twitter. Our case study includes 289,513 tweets which were collected on 60 consecutive days. In order to identify genres and to answer the research questions, we manually analyzed 500 randomly chosen tweets as well as all those tweets published by official corporate accounts. We come to the conclusion that communication in social media is indeed of high importance for adidas. Furthermore, we show that adidas enters the communication in Twitter strategically to increase the awareness of their products.