Perceptions of Customers as Sustained Competitive Advantages of Global Marketing Airline Alliances: A Hybrid Text Mining Approach

Gang-Hoon Seo and Munehiko Itoh
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Gang-Hoon Seo: Graduate School of Business Administration, Kobe University, Kobe 657-8501, Japan

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 15, 1-15

Abstract: Over the past several decades, the aviation industry has been reshaped, centering on global alliances, and these have grown exponentially. However, it is still not clear whether they are achieving sustained competitive advantages, and what are the specific competitive advantages of the three alliances (oneworld, SkyTeam, Star Alliance) arising on the customer side. This study aims to examine whether global alliance groups outperform the non-alliance group, how the three alliances differ regarding passengers’ perceptions, and what their competitive advantages are. A hybrid text mining analysis was adopted as this study’s method. Frequency tests, t -tests, one-way analysis of variance tests, and three-step mediated regression analyses were performed using 6393 ordinal and word-of-mouth (WOM) data. We found that the degree of passengers’ perceptions of alliances was low, the non-alliance group outperformed the alliance groups, and there were no significant differences between alliances on service rating and sentiment score. Only oneworld has competitive advantages that link to passengers’ service rating and sentiment score. These findings imply that alliances could not ensure competitive advantages that derive from customers’ perceptions, and although passengers partly perceived several selling points, their differentiation strategies are not successful.

Keywords: global marketing strategy; global airline alliance; competitive advantage; passengers’ perceptions; word of mouth; service rating; sentiment score; hybrid text mining analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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