Dr. Naser Pourazad, senior lecturer in marketing at Flinders University's College of Business, Creative Arts, Law and Social Sciences, has examined how video game fans express their brand advocacy through online forums—and this reveals distinct consumer engagement patterns that challenge traditional marketing approaches. "This isn't just about games," says Dr. Pourazad. "As brands try to build passionate fan bases, our study shows the traditional marketing playbook is broken."
The study, performed with Dr. Ehsan Abedin and Dr. Jacqueline Burgess and published in the Journal of Product & Brand Management, identified comments from communities of gamers who play the enduringly popular Call of Duty and Battlefield video games to understand how consumers support their preferred brands.
"We used advanced AI to settle a massive pop-culture debate: Why are the fan bases of popular video games Call of Duty and Battlefield so fiercely loyal, yet so different from each other?" explains Dr. Pourazad.
"Instead of asking people questions in a lab, we used large language models (LLMs, being advanced artificial intelligence systems designed to understand and process volumes of text) to analyze more than 23,000 raw, unfiltered and slang-heavy Reddit comments to see how brand loyalty actually happens in the community."
