Open Access
What are consumers saying online about your products?: mining the text of online reviews to uncover hidden features
(Henry Stewart Publications, 2021) Alzate Barricarte, Miriam; Arce Urriza, Marta; Cebollada Calvo, Javier; Gestión de Empresas; Enpresen Kudeaketa
Thanks to the growth of the internet and the increasing use of social networks, companies can now access huge volumes of online texts in order to understand consumers¿ preferences and needs. This article illustrates some methods to extrapolate information from such texts. The text-mining analysis covers such issues as word frequency, sentiment analysis, paired words, similarities in textual content and the main topics discussed in online reviews. From a practical point of view, brand managers can use the proposed methods to gain consumer insights into products and brands, to be able to improve and adapt their marketing strategies.
Open Access
An investigation of multichannel shopping behavior: evolution in a grocery retailer in Spain
(Nova Science Publications, 2015) Arce Urriza, Marta; Cebollada Calvo, Javier; Villanueva Orbaiz, María Luisa; Gestión de Empresas; Enpresen Kudeaketa
E-commerce in Spain is growing year by year, boosted mainly by the positive evolution of three variables such as: the percentage of Internet users, the proportion of Internet shoppers, and the average online spending per shopper. However, although grocery retailers were among the first marketers to incorporate the Internet as an additional shopping channel online grocery shopping in Spain is still low. In this work we analyze the evolution of the online shopping behavior for groceries for the same groups of clients of one of the major grocery retailers in Spain in a 4 years elapsed time. This chain was a pioneer selling groceries online, opening its online store in 2001. To do so, we analyze the purchase behavior of the clients per channel (offline and online), and the characteristics of the shopping baskets per client at each purchase occasion or trip. We also classify customers evaluating their use of the two channels.
Open Access
Online reviews and product sales: the role of review visibility
(MDPI, 2021) Alzate Barricarte, Miriam; Arce Urriza, Marta; Cebollada Calvo, Javier; Gestión de Empresas; Enpresen Kudeaketa
When studying the impact of online reviews on product sales, previous scholars have usually assumed that every review for a product has the same probability of being viewed by consumers. However, decision-making and information processing theories underline that the accessibility of information plays a role in consumer decision-making. We incorporate the notion of review visibility to study the relationship between online reviews and product sales, which is proxied by sales rank information, studying three different cases: (1) when every online review isassumed to have the same probability of being viewed; (2) when we assume that consumers sort online reviews by the most helpful mechanism; and (3) when we assume that consumers sort online reviews by the most recent mechanism. Review non-textual and textual variables are analyzed. The empirical analysis is conducted using a panel of 119 cosmetic products over a period of nine weeks. Using the system generalized method of moments (system GMM) method for dynamic models of panel data, our findings reveal that review variables influence product sales, but the magnitude, and even the direction of the effect, vary amongst visibility cases. Overall, the characteristics of the most helpful reviews have a higher impact on sales.
Embargo
Is review visibility fostering helpful votes? The role of review rank and review characteristics in the adoption of information
(Elsevier, 2024) Alzate Barricarte, Miriam; Arce Urriza, Marta; Cebollada Calvo, Javier; Gestión de Empresas; Enpresen Kudeaketa; Institute for Advanced Research in Business and Economics - INARBE
In online environments, where consumers usually face information overload, information regarding the number of helpful votes received by online reviews serves as a trust sign to aid consumers in their purchasing journeys. As consumers can only vote for a review as helpful if they have viewed it, the position of the review in the sequence of reviews is likely to influence the number of helpful votes that the review receives. We propose a model in which review helpfulness depends not only on the characteristics of the review and reviewer, but also on its visibility. Review visibility is defined in this study as the probability of a review being viewed by a consumer, and is measured by the inverse rank order of the review in the sequence of reviews at the online retailer when consumers sort reviews according to different criteria (most helpful and most recent). Using a database of 59,526 online reviews from a popular cosmetics online store in the US, we estimate a zero-inflated negative binomial (ZINB) regression and find evidence that review visibility has a strong impact in explaining the likelihood of a review being read by consumers and subsequently voted as helpful by consumers. This effect is even stronger when sorting is most helpful.
Open Access
Mining the text of online consumer reviews to analyze brand image and brand positioning
(Elsevier, 2022) Alzate Barricarte, Miriam; Arce Urriza, Marta; Cebollada Calvo, Javier; Gestión de Empresas; Enpresen Kudeaketa
The growth of the Internet has led to massive availability of online consumer reviews. So far, papers studying online reviews have mainly analysed how non-textual features, such as ratings and volume, influence different types of consumer behavior, such as information adoption decisions or product choices. However, little attention has been paid to examining the textual aspects of online reviews in order to study brand image and brand positioning. The text analysis of online reviews inevitably raises the concept of 'text mining'; that is, the process of extracting useful and meaningful information from unstructured text. This research proposes an unified, structured and easy-to-implement procedure for the text analysis of online reviews with the ultimate goal of studying brand image and brand positioning. The text mining analysis is based on a lexicon-based approach, the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (Pennebaker et al., 2007), which provides the researcher with insights into emotional and psychological brand associations.
Open Access
An empirical analysis of shopping behavior across online and offline channels for grocery products: the moderating effects of household and product characteristics
(Elsevier, 2010) Chu, Junhong; Arce Urriza, Marta; Cebollada Calvo, Javier; Chintagunta, Pradeep; Gestión de Empresas; Enpresen Kudeaketa; Gobierno de Navarra / Nafarroako Gobernua
We study the moderating effects of household (e.g., shopping frequency) and product (e.g., sensory nature) characteristics on household brand loyalty, size loyalty and price sensitivity across online and offline channels for grocery products. We analyze the shopping behavior of the same households that shop interchangeably in the online and offline stores of the same grocery chain in 93 categories of food, nonfood, sensory and nonsensory products. We find that households are more brand loyal, more size loyal but less price sensitive in the online channel than in the offline channel. Brand loyalty, size loyalty and price sensitivity are closely related to household and product characteristics. Light online shoppers exhibit the highest brand and size loyalties, but the lowest price sensitivity in the online channel. Heavy online shoppers display the lowest brand and size loyalties, but the highest price sensitivity in the online channel. Moderate online shoppers exhibit the highest price sensitivity in the offline channel. The online-offline differences in brand loyalty and price sensitivity are largest for light online shoppers and smallest for heavy online shoppers. The online-offline differences in brand loyalty, size loyalty and price sensitivity are larger for food products and for sensory products.