The Key Role of Social Media in Identifying Consumer Opinions for Building Sustainable Competitive Advantages

摘要

The continuous increase of competition in international markets and the diversification of consumers' interests and expectations of products and services expressed on the social media networks have led us to investigate how the opinions of consumers can significantly influence the changes in the strategy of the organizations. In order to find out the role of social media networks for developing a successful business based on consistent competitive advantages, we chose sentiment analysis and lexicon-based approach. In this paper we used a public dataset Women's Clothing E-Commerce Review, consisting of real commercial data collected by Nick Brooks, but being anonymized, to analyze the customers' reviews on fashion. The original dataset consists of 23486 customer reviews and 10 variables. The data are text and numerical types. First, we will analyze the numerical types to find out existing connections between data. We apply the supervised techniques, known as the corpus-based approach, such as neural networks and logistic regression by means of IBM SPSS Statistics v20 software. Thus, the manufacturing companies can discover in the opinions of the consumers the good parts of their products and services, which should be maintained and developed, but also not as good and totally inadequate characteristics of their products and services, which should be replaced. The results of our research help companies discover the key success factors for a business that can contribute significantly to their competitive advantages and also where they can intervene to change certain characteristics of the products and services offered on the market.