Brands that make me smile: Issues with using selfies to measure happiness

This paper examines the usefulness of analysing 'selfies' to understand how people feel about brands, finding that selfies are uncorrelated to people's true feelings about a brand and are not useful in research.

Brands that make me smile: Issues with using selfies to measure happiness

Pete Comley Join the Dots MR, United Kingdom

Introduction

Selfies (i.e. self-portrait photographs taken with a hand-held camera phone) have caught the public imagination in the last couple of years. Since the launch of the iPhone 4, with its front facing camera in 2010, their popularity has soared. In 2012, Time magazine rated selfies as one the top buzzwords of the year. Some people have estimated that the number of selfies taken in 2014 will reach nearly one trillion (Zigterman, 2013) and that they represent a third...

Not a subscriber?

Schedule your live demo with our team today

WARC helps you to plan, create and deliver more effective marketing

  • Prove your case and back-up your idea

  • Get expert guidance on strategic challenges

  • Tackle current and emerging marketing themes

We’re long-term subscribers to WARC and it’s a tool we use extensively. We use it to source case studies and best practice for the purposes of internal training, as well as for putting persuasive cases to clients. In compiling a recent case for long-term, sustained investment in brand, we were able to support key marketing principles with numerous case studies sourced from WARC. It helped bring what could have been a relatively dry deck to life with recognisable brand successes from across a broad number of categories. It’s incredibly efficient to have such a wealth of insight in one place.

Insights Team
Bray Leino

You’re in good company

We work with 80% of Forbes' most valuable brands* and 80% of the world's top top-of-the-class agencies.

* Top 10 brands