Uniting the Tribes: Using Text for Marketing Insight

Abstract

Words are part of almost every marketplace interaction. Online reviews, customer service calls, press releases, marketing communications, and other interactions create a wealth of textual data. But how can marketers best use such data? This article provides an overview of automated textual analysis and details how it can be used to generate marketing insights. The authors discuss how text reflects qualities of the text producer (and the context in which the text was produced) and impacts the audience or text recipient. Next, they discuss how text can be a powerful tool both for prediction and for understanding (i.e., insights). Then, the authors overview methodologies and metrics used in text analysis, providing a set of guidelines and procedures. Finally, they further highlight some common metrics and challenges and discuss how researchers can address issues of internal and external validity. They conclude with a discussion of potential areas for future work. Along the way, the authors note how textual analysis can unite the tribes of marketing. While most marketing problems are interdisciplinary, the field is often fragmented. By involving skills and ideas from each of the subareas of marketing, text analysis has the potential to help unite the field with a common set of tools and approaches.

How online word‐of‐mouth impacts receivers

“…Little work has simultaneously considered the effects of more than one type of linguistic content—yet exploring the relationships between multiple word categories and different parts of speech is a critical component of building a comprehensive picture of how content impacts receivers. To make this task more manageable, researchers could use various text analysis tools (Berger et al, ; Humphreys & Wang, ; Rocklage et al, ) and rely on broader linguistic frameworks (Pogacar, Shrum, & Lowery, ) or theories (e.g., narrative; Van Laer et al, ) to provide insight into how different aspects of language might combine, and which constellations of words might be impactful.…”

Strategies for Marketing Really New Products to the Mass Market: A Text Mining-Based Case Study of Virtual Reality Games

“…In a comprehensive review, Berger et al [37] discuss how text can be useful in marketing research. One major focus of previous studies using web extraction has been users' behavior and their opinions [38][39][40], both of which leave traces on the Internet, e.g., analyzing customers' complaints to generate insights on their needs and, thus, guide product development [41].…”

“…Additionally, Berger et al [37] point out how text can be used to understand organizations. Text can reflect its creator, even if the creator is an organization, e.g., mission statements [46].…”

“…Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) [37,51] is a common technique in topic modeling. LDA topic modeling automatically identifies topics within a text corpus and from each document.…”

Strength in diversity: methods and analytics

“…Given this growth, organizations that are capable to using a diversity of methodologies to analyze their data will experience a competitive advantage. Marketers need to be equipped to extract underlying insights from their data; those insights can enable them to measure, track, understand, and interpret the marketplace (Berger et al 2019). As previous research indicates, no one theory, or set of theories that justifies the use of a particular method can be comprehensive (Midgley et al 2017), especially when dealing with such a large quantity of unstructured data.…”