Online consumers’ opinions analysis for marketing strategy evaluation

Abstract

With over two billion users having access to social media accounts, people increasingly choose to express themselves online. Electronic word of mouth generates large amounts of data, making it a valuable source for big data analytics. This provides organisations with key capabilities for improved decision-making through mining insights directly from online sources. In this work we gathered and analysed the sentiment of consumers’ tweets regarding the release of two smartphone products. Tweeter data was collected using a custom-made Android application. The research question addressed in this study focused on whether the marketing positioning strategy of the company under investigation was successful after the release of two of its new products. To evaluate this, we compared the product positioning strategy of the firm before and after the release of the product. Consumers’ opinions were analysed to identify possible discrepancies between planned consumers’ reactions and sentiments, as strategized by the company, and how these were altered with the release of the product.