Mine Your Own Business: Market-Structure Surveillance Through Text Mining

Oded Netzer (), Ronen Feldman (), Jacob Goldenberg () and Moshe Fresko ()
Additional contact information
Oded Netzer: Graduate School of Business, Columbia University, New York, New York 10027
Ronen Feldman: School of Business Administration, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mount Scopus, Jerusalem, Israel 91905
Jacob Goldenberg: School of Business Administration, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mount Scopus, Jerusalem, Israel 91905; and Columbia Business School, New York, New York 10027
Moshe Fresko: Jerusalem, Israel 91905

Marketing Science, 2012, vol. 31, issue 3, 521-543

Abstract: Web 2.0 provides gathering places for Internet users in blogs, forums, and chat rooms. These gathering places leave footprints in the form of colossal amounts of data regarding consumers' thoughts, beliefs, experiences, and even interactions. In this paper, we propose an approach for firms to explore online user-generated content and "listen" to what customers write about their and their competitors' products. Our objective is to convert the user-generated content to market structures and competitive landscape insights. The difficulty in obtaining such market-structure insights from online user-generated content is that consumers' postings are often not easy to syndicate. To address these issues, we employ a text-mining approach and combine it with semantic network analysis tools. We demonstrate this approach using two cases--sedan cars and diabetes drugs--generating market-structure perceptual maps and meaningful insights without interviewing a single consumer. We compare a market structure based on user-generated content data with a market structure derived from more traditional sales and survey-based data to establish validity and highlight meaningful differences.

Keywords: text mining; user-generated content; market structure; marketing research (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (146)

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