Narratives for Sale: Conceptualizing and Measuring the Marketplace for Consumer Chatter in a Digital World

Abstract

Marketing agility has emerged as a critical capability in an era where consumer chatter unfolds in real-time across digital platforms. This thesis extends the concept of marketing agility by introducing the Marketplace for Consumer Chatter, a dynamic environment where brands, competitors, and broader societal actors engage in continuous narrative co-creation. Unlike traditional marketing models and approaches that emphasize firm-driven messaging or top-down ideological discourse analysis, this framework conceptualizes marketing success as the ability to sense, interpret, and shape consumer chatter in response to evolving cultural, social, and competitive dynamics. To model this complex interplay, the research proposes the Marketplace for Consumer Chatter Analysis Framework (MCC Analysis Framework), which builds on BERTopic, a state-of-the-art topic modeling framework, combining it with hierarchical clustering approaches to systematically analyze large-scale consumer-generated content. This framework allows for the identification of key thematic structures within slices of the Marketplace for Consumer Chatter and tracks their evolution over time. The study examines the Marketplace for Consumer Chatter at three interconnected levels: brand-level, competitor-level, and social-level within the context of Nike’s “Dream Crazy” campaign. Findings demonstrate that marketing actions can trigger marketplace structural shifts, amplifying or redirecting chatter in ways that may extend beyond the firm’s initial intent. Some interventions integrate seamlessly into ongoing conversations, reinforcing brand positioning, while others introduce unexpected narrative trajectories, leading to controversy, backlash, or fragmentation. By bridging marketing agility theory with real-time consumer chatter analysis, this research provides a novel framework for assessing the causal impact of marketing actions on consumer chatter, offering key insights for proactive and reactive agile marketing strategy.