Understanding consumers’ associations with brands is a central part of brand management. However, this is challenging because consumers can associate a brand with any number of objects, emotions, activities, sceneries, and concepts. This research presents an elicitation platform, methodology, and results from a sample of over 300 U.S. national brands. The proposed platform, Brand Visual Elicitation Platform (B-VEP), allows firms to collect online brand collages from consumers. Using unsupervised machine-learning and image-processing approaches, the authors analyze the collages to obtain a detailed set of associations for each brand. The elicitation is direct, unaided, scalable, quantitative, and uses the power of visuals to depict a detailed representation of respondents’ relationships with a brand. The value of the tool is discussed, including: obtaining prototypical brand visuals; relating associations to brand personality and equity; identifying favorable associations per category; exploring brand uniqueness through differentiating associations; and identifying commonalities between brands across categories for potential collaborations.
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