“Collaborative” strategies between journalists and brand managers in the context of product differentiation: a comparative analysis of three brands in the automotive industry

Abstract

Through the comparative analysis of a case of the automobile sector, this work intends to reflect on how news contribute to the activation and differentiation of brands and products. The main objective is to understand how media relations and narrative journalism “collaborate”. In order to do this, it is necessary to understand how journalists scrutinize and incorporate the information coming from the brands and, on the other hand, how they evaluate the impact of what they write. Methodologically, this research is based on qualitative methods. Firstly, content analysis was done comparing the journalistic narratives about the products of three brands. These results were then crossed with semi-structured interviews with two journalists who wrote about the products under analysis. The results obtained were discussed in the light of the literature of brand management, public relations and media relations, providing clues about the type of information that journalists prefer in the process of building the news, as they perceive the relationship between journalists and information sources and, finally, how they evaluate the impact of their work on the strategies of differentiation and positioning of brands.