Marketing insight from consumer reviews: Creating brand position through opinion mining approach

Abstract

PurposeBrand managers can determine the ideas, perceptions, or experiences of consumers about their brands and their competitors through traditional marketing research techniques such as focus group discussions, surveys, and in-depth interviews. Through these methods, brands can observe the visual expression of consumer perceptions concretely by using perception maps or radar chart techniques. However, traditional methods have certain limitations. The validity of brand positioning in perception maps may be questioned since consumers' answers to survey questions can be misleading, consumers may express opinions about a product that they have not purchased yet, and other methods may divert the opinions of consumers at a specific stage.In this study, global brand positions in the minds of consumers were concretized through perception maps by analyzing product comments on e-commerce sites through the use of opinion mining/sentiment analysis, one of the text mining methods. Moreover, perception maps and radar charts were created for the selected brands by forming the dataset from consumers’ reviews about brands and products in online environments. perception map errors caused by traditional methods have been prevented by using opinion mining/sentiment analysis, which constitutes the originality of the research. Design/methodology/approachIn this study, the text mining method, which includes opinion mining and sentiment analysis techniques, has been used to create perceptual maps from consumer reviews about products on e-commerce platforms. The TF*IDF method is used to identify the features to be compared in the perceptual map, which selects the features with weighted importance among the features mentioned by consumers in their comments. In this study, a lexicon-based opinion mining technique has been used to assign sentiment scores to consumers' comments on e-commerce websites for each product and its specified features. FindingsThe findings of the study have illustrated the areas in which the brands are evaluated as “insufficient” or “successful” by consumers within the framework of the characteristics selected in the study. It has been revealed that the method used in the research can provide accurate results for brand managers to make positioning decisions and develop effective marketing strategies. Research limitations/implicationsThe research has been conducted by analyzing product reviews about selected brands on e-commerce platforms. The comments selected within the scope of the research include only those written in the Turkish language, and the evaluations have been carried out on the comments made until a specific date. Originality/valueIn this study, the analyses of the comments on the selected brands have ensured that the businesses are informed of the level of perception about their products in the market and that the research is based on a holistic approach that helps other consumers to develop a perspective on a specific product based on the comments of a consumer who shares his/her experience about the aforesaid product.