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

23 Pages Posted: 24 Oct 2012 Last revised: 9 Jan 2024

See all articles by Oded Netzer

Oded Netzer

Columbia University - Columbia Business School, Marketing

Ronen Feldman

Hebrew University of Jerusalem - Jerusalem School of Business Administration

Jacob Goldenberg

Hebrew University of Jerusalem - Jerusalem School of Business Administration

Moshe Fresko

Independent

Date Written: 2012

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

Suggested Citation

Netzer, Oded and Feldman, Ronen and Goldenberg, Jacob and Fresko, Moshe, Mine Your Own Business: Market-Structure Surveillance through Text Mining (2012). Marketing Science, Vol. 31, No. 3, 2012; pp. 521-543; DOI: 10.1287/mksc.1120.0713, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2160759

Oded Netzer (Contact Author)

Columbia University - Columbia Business School, Marketing ( email )

New York, NY 10027
United States

Ronen Feldman

Hebrew University of Jerusalem - Jerusalem School of Business Administration ( email )

Mount Scopus
Jerusalem, 91905
Israel

Jacob Goldenberg

Hebrew University of Jerusalem - Jerusalem School of Business Administration ( email )

Mount Scopus
Jerusalem, 91905
Israel
972-2-5883226 (Phone)
972-2-58813 (Fax)

Moshe Fresko

Independent ( email )

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