Abstract
This study aims to survey user-generated content (UGC) from diners in certified green restaurants, discover the green images they recall, and demonstrate the usefulness of applying a probabilistic topic model to comprehend customers’ perceptions. Postvisit online reviews ( N = 28,098), in the form of unstructured texts from the TripAdvisor.com website, were used to find freely recalled green-restaurant images. These data were preprocessed with a structural topic model (STM) algorithm to select 51 relevant categories of images. These image categories were compared with the findings of previous studies to discover unique restaurant attributes. Furthermore, a topic-level network and a green-restaurant network were drawn to discover the most easily recallable image categories and their attributes. This machine-learning-based approach improved the reproducibility of unstructured data analyses, overcoming the subjectivity of qualitative data analysis. Theoretical and practical implications are offered for topic modeling methodology along with marketing strategies for restaurateurs.
Highlights
Hospitality firms have implemented sustainable—or “green”—practices to respond to customers’ demands for proenvironment corporate action (Aragon-Correa et al, 2015)
To answer its first research question, which sought to identify salient image categories about green restaurants, the study sampled user-generated content (UGC) written by actual green-restaurant customers and analyzed it using topic modeling to discover prevalent themes shared across customers
The prevalent themes discovered from green-restaurant reviews may represent most memorable image categories in relation to their green-restaurant experiences
Summary
Hospitality firms have implemented sustainable—or “green”—practices to respond to customers’ demands for proenvironment corporate action (Aragon-Correa et al, 2015). A restaurateur’s commitment to creating a green image by implementing sustainable practices may not always lead to positive outcomes if such practices are not communicated to or noticed by customers (Yadav et al, 2016). The discrepancy between the green image a company seeks to convey to stakeholders and those stakeholders’ actual perceptions may be greater in the restaurant sphere than in other business sectors, partly because many sustainable practices occur back-of-house (Brown et al, 2006). To understand customers’ true green images, it is required that one first identify whether customers perceive the green attributes and salient green-image categories that are stored in their memories (Keaveney & Hunt, 1992). Not found T32: Good service (knowledgeable employees) T6: Bad service (slow service) T21: Bad service (long wait) T26: Good service (quick, friendly service) T40: Good service (prompt seating) T38: Good service (attentive staffs) T46: Bad service (inattentive service) Not found Not found Not found T2: Décor
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