The Marketing Value of User-Generated Content in the Mobile Industry

With smartphones’ popularity and the mobile Internet's rapid development, User Generated Content (UGC) has become a popular marketing tool. UGC refers to the content ordinary consumers actively create and share, such as user comments, order displays, short videos, pictures, etc. The emergence of UGC breaks the boundary between enterprises and consumers in traditional marketing, making consumers the participants and promoters of brand marketing. UGC increasingly affects customers’ choices. For example, many potential customers may buy digital products according to the posts about evaluating specific products online. This study adopts a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods. Using the Questionnaire survey and Text sentiment analysis methods, the study analyzes the marketing value of UGC for four smartphone brands: Apple, Huawei, Xiaomi, and Samsung. The study discovered the advantages and limitations of UGC's dissemination effects.