Virtual communities and market segmentation: an exploratory approach, using neural networks and virtual community's data

Edar da Silva Añaña, Leandro Maurício Medeiros Vieira, Martin de La Martinière Petroll, Renan Petersen-Wagner and Ricardo Simm Costa

RAC - Revista de Administração Contemporânea (Journal of Contemporary Administration), 2008, vol. 12, issue spe, 41-63

Abstract: During the last few years, endless data have supplied the marketing area with new perspectives for the definition and segmentation of markets, in addition to the company's private and internal data banks as well as of public and external ones. An example of the latter are the virtual communities, and Orkut is one of its exponents. This article, offers an exploratory approach to market segmentation using two alternative methods (logistic regression and neural networks) through secondary data collected from Orkut, assuming the possibility to predict certain consumption attitudes described by members of virtual communities. This way, two communities self denominated I love cold beer and I hate beer were picked up, and each one supplied random probabilistic samples among 400 members. Processing and analyzing the data collected in three phases - data cleaning and selection of variables of interest, discriminating analysis, and analysis through neural networks - confirmed the possibility of determining consuming attitudes, and consequently of using the Orkut virtual community as a data bank for segmentation. Further contributions, limitations and implications are part of this study.

Date: 2008
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://rac.anpad.org.br/index.php/rac/article/view/650/647 (text/html)
https://rac.anpad.org.br/index.php/rac/article/download/650/647 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:abg:anprac:v:12:y:2008:i:spe:650

Access Statistics for this article

RAC - Revista de Administração Contemporânea (Journal of Contemporary Administration) is currently edited by Marcelo de Souza Bispo

More articles in RAC - Revista de Administração Contemporânea (Journal of Contemporary Administration) from ANPAD - Associação Nacional de Pós-Graduação e Pesquisa em Administração
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Information Technology of ANPAD ().