A Comparison of Starbucks between South Korea and U.S.A. through Big Data Analysis

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to compare the Starbucks in South Korea with Starbucks in U.S.A through the semantic network analysis of big data by collecting online data with SCTM(Smart Crawling & Text Mining) program which was developed by big data research institute at Kyungsung University, a data collecting and processing program. The data collection period was from January 1st 2014 to December 7th 2017, and packaged Netdraw along with UCINET 6.0 were utilized for data analysis and visualization. After performing CONCOR(convergence of iterated correlation) analysis and centrality analysis, this study illustrated the current characteristics of Starbucks for Korea and U.S.A reflected by the social network and the differences between Korea and U.S.A. Since the Starbucks was greatly developed, especially in Korea. this study also was supposed to provide significant and social-network oriented suggestions for Starbucks USA, Starbucks Korea and also the whole coffee industry. Also this study revealed that big data analytics can generate new insights into variables that have been extensively studied in existing hospitality literature. In addition, implications for theory and practice as well as directions for future research are discussed.