Inter-category map: Building cognition network of general customers through big data mining

Social media is considered a valuable platform for gathering and analyzing the collective and subconscious opinions of people in Internet and mobile environments, where they express, explicitly and implicitly, their daily preferences for brands and products. Extracting and tracking the various attitudes and concerns that people express through social media could enable us to categorize brands and decipher individuals' cognitive decision-making structure in their choice of brands. We investigate the cognitive network structure of consumers by building an inter-category map through the mining of big data. In so doing, we create an improved online recommendation model. Building on economic sociology theory, we suggest a framework for revealing collective preference by analyzing the patterns of brand names that users frequently mention in the online public sphere. We expect that our study will be useful for those conducting theoretical research on digital marketing strategies and doing practical work on branding strategies.