Author(s): Barbara Castillo Abdul, Luis M. Romero Rodriguez and Amor Perez Rodriguez
Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have revolutionized all human interactions, creating new spaces and platforms for consumption and entertainment. In that regard, marketing and advertising have had to adapt by refocusing existing tools, as well as creating new strategies to reach their target audiences. Among these emerging tools are the Branded Content, which combines the conventional advertising message with entertainment and ICT, to create emotional and entertainment links between the consumer and the brands. However, given the novelty of Branded Content as an object of academic study, this research seeks to make a mapping of the state of the art that serves as a starting point for the epistemological understanding of the phenomenon, as well as to know the different conceptual positions of the most cited authors of Branded Content, specifically in fashion marketing research. For this objective, a bibliometric analysis is performed through a strategy of co-occurrence and co-citation of Boolean operators from the Scopus database, using the BibExcel tool for frequency counting and VosViewer for the visualization of data and interaction maps. The results indicate that between 2016 and 2018 the co-citation keywords varied widely, from terms such as "content analysis" and "marketing" in 2016, to "fashion films" in 2018, which clearly shows that there is not yet an academic and possibly even a pragmatic consensus on the delimitations of Branded Content.