Mapping Brand Equity through UGC: A Topic Model Analysis of Bangkok Design Week on Xiaohongshu
Article Sidebar
Main Article Content
บทคัดย่อ
User-generated content (UGC) is a powerful tool in digital marketing, particularly in
shaping brand perception around emotionally and thematically driven public events. This study explores how Bangkok Design Week (BKKDW), a cultural event in Bangkok, Thailand, is portrayed by Chinese-speaking users on Xiaohongshu, a popular travel and lifestyle platform. A total of 1,238 posts and comments spanning a seven-year period were collected using BKKDW-related hashtags. This research employed Biterm Topic Modeling (BTM), a technique optimized for short-text corpora, to identify macro-level thematic clusters in user discourse. Sentiment analysis was conducted using SnowNLP to assess emotional tone. Findings were interpreted through Keller’s (1993) Customer-Based Brand Equity (CBBE) model, mapping identified topics and sentiments to the six brand equity dimensions: brand identity, brand imagery, brand performance, brand feelings, brand judgment, and resonance. Results show that BKKDW is positively associated with creativity, visual aesthetics, and cultural hybridity, but shows weaker associations with brand loyalty and long-term engagement among Xiaohongshu users. This study contributes to cultural branding and cross-cultural digital communication by demonstrating how computational methods can be applied to examine public sentiment and narrative construction in a non-Western social media environment. It also offers practical recommendations for event organizers aiming to increase brand equity through strategic engagement on Chinese platforms.
Article Details
อนุญาตภายใต้เงื่อนไข Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
ต้นฉบับที่ได้รับการตีพิมพ์ในวารสารศิลปกรรมบูรพา (Burapha Arts Journal) คณะศิลปกรรมศาสตร์ มหาวิทยาลัยบูรพา ถือเป็นกรรมสิทธิ์ของมหาวิทยาลัยบูรพา ห้ามนำข้อความทั้งหมดหรือบางส่วนไปพิมพ์ซ้ำเว้นเสียแต่ว่าจะได้รับอนุญาตจากมหาวิทยาลัยฯ เป็นลายลักษณ์อักษร
เอกสารอ้างอิง
Aboalganam, K. M., AlFraihat, S. F., & Tarabieh, S. (2025). The impact of user-generated content on tourist visit intentions: The mediating role of destination imagery. Administrative Sciences, 15(4), 117. https://doi.org/10.3390/admsci15040117
Aceninja. (2025, January 2). Xiaohongshu trends in 2025. Retrieved from https://www.aceninja.sg/insights/2025/01/02/xiaohongshu-trends-in-2025
Alabi, M. (2024). The role of user-generated content in building brand trust and consumer engagement in fashion retail. ResearchGate. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/386218105
Bangkok Design Week. (2023). About the event. Retrieved from https://www.bangkokdesignweek.com/
Bhatti, A., Arif, S., & Younas, S. (2018). Impact of social media brand communication on brand knowledge: Mediating role of brand image & brand awareness application of CBBE model theory of Keller. Journal of Management Info, 4(4), 12–18. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326832844
Chen, Y., & Zhang, X. (2025). Building community resilience and calling for collective actions: Corporate disaster aid communication on Chinese social media. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 10(1), Article 49. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-025-05049-7
Chen, Z. (2024). Thematic and sentiment analysis of replies to depression help-seeking related posts on Sina Weibo. Applied and Computational Engineering, 88(1), 127–137.
Dai, W. (2024). Analysis of co-branded food product reviews based on BERTopic and SnowNLP. Academic Journal of Computing & Information Science, 7(7), 105–112. https://doi.org/10.25236/AJCIS.2024.070714
Diederiks, C. (2023). Evaluating the effectiveness of the topic models LDA and BTM for short texts (Master’s thesis, Utrecht University).
Digital Crew. (2025). China's coolest search engine: Xiaohongshu. Retrieved from https://www.digitalcrew.agency/theyre-not-googling-it-theyre-xiaohongshu-ing-it/
Howard, E. (2020). Researching event-centred projects: Showcasing grounded aesthetics [Conference paper]. Making Futures Journal, Plymouth College of Art. Retrieved from https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/42387/1/1411146_Howard.pdf
Hudson, S., Roth, M. S., Madden, T. J., & Hudson, R. (2015). The effects of social media on emotions, brand relationship quality, and word of mouth: An empirical study of music festival attendees. Tourism Management, 47, 68–76. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2014.09.001
Keller, K. L. (1993). Conceptualizing, measuring, and managing customer-based brand equity. Journal of Marketing, 57(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224299305700101
Keller, K. L. (2001). Building customer-based brand equity: A blueprint for creating strong brands. Marketing Management, 10(2), 15–19.
Li, X., Meng, Y., Sun, X., Han, Q., Yuan, A., & Li, J. (2019). Is word segmentation necessary for deep learning of Chinese representations? arXiv. Retrieved from https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.05526
Mei, X. (2024). The influence of user-generated beauty content on Xiaohongshu on the purchase decisions of Generation Z Chinese women. Advances in Economics Management and Political Sciences, 141(1), 20–27. https://doi.org/10.54254/2754-1169/2024.GA18927
Muntinga, D. G., Moorman, M., & Smit, E. G. (2011). Introducing COBRAs: Exploring motivations for brand-related social media use. International Journal of Advertising, 30(1), 13–46. https://doi.org/10.2501/IJA-30-1-013-046
NewsHub Asia. (2023). Thailand to escalate the creative economy through Bangkok Design Week. Retrieved from https://www.newshubasia.com/mgbfevent/thailand-to-escalate-thecreative-economy-through-bangkok-design-week/
Ning, K. (2024). Research on brand marketing strategies on the Xiaohongshu platform. In Proceedings of the 2024 15th International Conference on E-business, Management and Economics (ICEME 2024) (pp. 264–270). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3691422.3691448
Praphruetmon, C., & Wang, Y. (2023). The influence of Thailand tourism user-generated content on Chinese tourists’ behavioral intentions. University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce Journal Humanities and Social Sciences, 43(2), 76–97. https://so06.tcithaijo. org/index.php/utccjournalhs/article/view/261281
Prayudi, P., Ardhanariswari, K. A., & Probosari, N. (2022). City branding: Bangkok as creative city of design. Asian Institute of Research Journal of Social and Political Sciences, 5(3), 129–142. https://doi.org/10.31014/aior.1991.05.03.370
Santos, I., Rech, L., & Moraes, R. (2022). A topic modeling method for analysis of short-text data in social media networks. EPiC Series in Computing, 82, 112–121. Retrieved from https://easychair.org/publications/paper/HD6L/open
Shetty, N. K., Singh, P., Yashaswini, M., & Hiremath, Y. (2024). The power of user-generated content: Elevating consumers' brand perception, purchase, and post-purchase behavior in the food and beverage industry. Economic and Entrepreneurship Letters, 14(4). http://10.52783/eel.v14i4.2346
TimeOut Bangkok. (2018). The story behind Bangkok Design Week. Retrieved from https://www.timeout.com/bangkok
UNESCO. (2020). Bangkok: Creative city of design. UNESCO Creative Cities Network. Retrieved from https://www.unesco.org/en/creative-cities/bangkok
WalktheChat. (2023). Xiaohongshu: Building e-commerce via word of mouth. Retrieved from https://walkthechat.com
Wan, R., Tong, L., Knearem, T., Li, T. J.-J., Huang, T.-H., & Wu, Q. (2025). Hashtag re-appropriation for audience control on recommendation-driven social media Xiaohongshu (RedNote). In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1–25). ACM. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2501.18210
Wang, L., & Wang, L. (2022). A case study of Chinese sentiment analysis on social media reviews based on LSTM. arXiv. Retrieved from https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.17452
Wei, W. (2023). Re-feminizing beauty in the multimodal storytelling practices of Chinese social media influencers on Xiaohongshu (RED). In H. Mori, Y. Asahi, A. Coman, S. Vasilache, & M.
Rauterberg (Eds.), HCI International 2023 – Late Breaking Papers (pp. 400–419). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48044-7_29
World Design Weeks. (2025). Bangkok Design Week profile. Retrieved from https://www.worlddesignweeks.org/
Wu, Q., Gu, L., Zhang, M., & Liu, H. (2024). Understanding dual effects of social network services on digital well-being and sustainability: A case study of Xiaohongshu (RED). Sustainability, 16(15), 6709. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16156709
Wu, X., Luu, A. T., & Dong, X. (2022). Mitigating data sparsity for short text topic modeling by topic-semantic contrastive learning. arXiv. Retrieved from https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.12878
Xu, H., Cheung, L. T. O., Lovett, J., Duan, X., Pei, Q., & Liang, D. (2021). Understanding the influence of user-generated content on tourist loyalty behavior in a cultural World
Heritage Site. Tourism Recreation Research, 48(2), 173–187. https://doi.org/10.1080/02508281.2021.1913022
Yan, X., Guo, J., Lan, Y., & Cheng, X. (2013). A biterm topic model for short texts. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on World Wide Web (pp. 1445–1456). ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/2488388.2488514
Yi, H., & Xian, L. (2024). The informal labor of content creators: Situating Xiaohongshu's key opinion consumers in relationships to marketers, consumer brands, and the platform. arXiv. Retrieved from https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.08360
Yuan, J., Wang, H., & Li, X. (2015). A topic-based Chinese microblog polarity classification system. In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Social Media (pp.44–49). Association for Computational Linguistics. Retrieved from. https://aclanthology.org/W15-3127.pdf
Zhao, Y. (2024). Assessment and optimization of social media marketing strategies: A case study of Xiaohongshu. In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Engineering Management, Information Technology and Intelligence (EMITI 2024) (pp. 679–684). SCITEPRESS. https://doi.org/10.5220/0012968300004508
Zhou, B., Zhu, Y., & Mao, X. (2022). Sentiment analysis on power rationing micro blog comments based on SnowNLP-SVM-LDA model. Highlights in Science, Engineering and Technology, 4, 179–185. https://doi.org/10.54097/hset.v4i.863 2 (2): 181-212.
