Case study Reviews

Ushna Faraz -14322

Text Analysis:
According to a case study “Application of social media analytics: a case of analyzing online hotel
reviews” [ CITATION HeW17 \l 1033 ] there have been multiple tools used in analysis of how people
respond with their emotions, opinions, thoughts and these aspects are so important for hotels for their
brand image and advertisement. Therefore, through this case study they used text mining and
sentiment analysis methods to study different reviews on online platforms for hotels.

The hotel industry has continued to adopt social media streams as a source of customer attraction and
quality service improvement. Three-to-five-star hotels in four big cities of China were used as the
database for this study and user- generated, they have also only filtered out those 3- start hotels which
happen to host foreign clients. They also do a detailed literature review in order to work out dynamics of
the existent online platforms before they analyze first hand data. Since the data is too large, there is
increasing work being done in the area of computational methods and for this they used text mining to
rationalize the review and suggest actionable insights to hotels.

Text mining is a pre-tested measure as it happened in case of, He et al. (2013) where unstructured text
from twitter and Facebook from three large Pizza franchises namely Domino’s Pizza, Pizza hut and Papa
John’s Pizza was translated to useful content and gave these franchises very meaningful data to play
around with. There was a different relationship built between two things when this technique was
applied to Chinese hotel industry:

1- The 5- Star ratings given to different hotels is directly linked to their feedbacks.
2- Unsatisfied customers tend to highlight very tangible aspects of the hotels such as the furniture
and finances.

The method used to do this was they went on bookings.com and took out 500 positive and 500 negative
feedbacks and then categorized different aspects as controllable and noncontrollable factors.

Controllable Noncontrollable
Staff Location- related – beach, pool
food Hotel history – how old is it?
bed
service
Furniture

Sentiment analysis on the other hand tried to decompose the content into 4 different spectrums tot
measure hotel service quality and turned out to be much more accurate compared to other tools. The
research included 45000 customer reviews which can be summarized in these heads:

Dimensions Examples
Differential impacts of activation levels tentative language
implicit sentiment expressions commissive language
discourse patterns incoherence
overall consumer sentiment star ratings
Case study Reviews
Ushna Faraz -14322

They further highlighted these repetitive key words and allocated a frequency to them which highly
correlated to their overall responses:

1- Guest
2- Training
3- Energy
4- Water
5- Purchasing
6- Education

Network Analysis:
According to the Case-study “The importance of Facebook as an online social networking tool for
companies” [CITATION Ped \l 1033 ], Facebook has acted as a key marketing tool for marketing by
different companies and through empirical evidence (through questionaries and interviews) and through
theoretical analysis (though literature review). The main objective of this case-study is divided in to two
marketing communication channels i.e., Consumer and business. The technique to of this is social
network analysis tool which is applied on randomly generated consumers in randomly generated cities
in Portugal namely Funchal and Lisbon.

In essence what the case-study is trying to achieve is that different firms should take up different
communication styles in order to boost sales with different segments in the audience. They should
consider methods like network analysis embedded in their value chains to expand their revenues and
attracting customers who are new and not contemplated by orthodox marketing models. Therefore,
through this analysis sustainable networks can be formed which can further be targeted with the
offers/bundles and competitive advantage can be established.

Facebook has become more of a shopping experience rather than just a social media forum to kill time
and therefore an important tool to monitor such social networks in order to define marketing and
communication cycles. They have further revealed that accurate use of this tool can lead to effective
viral social media campaigns while reducing costs. They have used development of web 2.0 to their
advantage by constructing more than a unilateral form of marketing for brands to a more bidirectional
space that when integrated social networks, it’s easier to find celebrities for endorsement for a
particular product and create recommendations such as a friend of yours may have followed a certain
page and you are most likely to do so as well.

The social network analysis brings out the art of storytellers, the content that involves advertising,
movies and other informational communication. When we build connections, interactivity chains and
participation channels we can easily escalate the brand stories from one family friend to a distant
relative with a tweak in the algos. The circle of media is basically the social network which is made of
organizations and people connected by one or more types of relationships which have a common aim or
shared values. These are beyond Facebook and exist on Twitter, LinkedIn and mostly on many other
forums. Tapscott and Williams (2008) have used a “mass collaboration” as an analogy with social
networks with attributes listed below:

1- Transparency
2- Globalization
Case study Reviews
Ushna Faraz -14322

3- Participation
4- Collaboration

The companies and markets which have identified these untapped tools before others, have develops a
first-movers competitive advantage over other companies and established a very strong relationship
between network marketing and sales.

Clustering:
According to the case-study “Integrating multi-criteria decision making and clustering for business
customer segmentation” [ CITATION Hül \l 1033 ], 2015, the approach is to create a multi-screened
clustering tool in order to segment the audiences for businesses. 5 important aspects are put in place to
do this and 3 hierarchical clustering algos are used.

To understand the feasibility of this project they have used these 3 hierarchal clustering methods:

1- Ward’s Method
2- Single Linkage
3- Complete Linkage

And also used K- means clustering to see accuracy of the conclusions driven in this study.

The success of this study revealed that International original equipment manufacturer (OEM) 317
business customers are effectively segmented as follows:

1- Best
2- Valued
3- Average
4- Potential Invaluable

Using K- means they first generated random centroids and kept decreasing mean difference among each
point, this allowed them to finally define these 4 areas. However, there were limitations here since the
entire application was based on the customer data available at hand and the entire design of this
database was the foundation of this study under OEM’s customer relationship management solution
(CRM). Therefore, there database may or mat not be revealing a noteworthy analysis.

Clustering at most can slice the audience under different heads but does not give adequate information
of significance of each segment. And customer valuation is of key essence to take correct marketing
decisions. Therefore, researchers weighted each segment using relative weighs of the RFM variables
through K- means and further carried out analyze hierarchical process (AHP) in their study. This led to
clustered being ranked and based on integrated rating which was equaled to sum of weighted RFM
values of centroid in each cluster. The ranking was further improved using distance between centers.
Since companies have very limited resources so they should automatically target the most valued
customers to help gain most optimization on constraints identified.

The research was done in these 3 phases:

Phase 1: Cleaning the Dataset Phase 2: Segmentation of Phase 3: Ranking the customer
Customers segments
Analyzing business environment Segment customers using Determine the relative
Case study Reviews
Ushna Faraz -14322

hierarchical and partitional importance of the segmentation

Variables being defined for
segmentation
Normalizing the set of data
points
Compute value of variables
clustering algorithms
Evaluate the cluster validity and
determine the appropriate
number of clusters
variables by using a proper
multi-criteria decision-making
method
Rank the customer segments by
taking weighted average of the
cluster centroids
Profile the customer segments

Bibliography
Correia, P. A. (2014). Emerald. Retrieved from The importance of Facebook:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/IJAIM-08-2013-0050/full/pdf?
casa_token=vQNtWWSUHzEAAAAA:8zT1Jdkt1YprWg3DQUdVbojg8nuK_AKa5lOwqXKBt5ToYxGj
ERNp8T68tomBPAjH6qSN8MtU_9wUzwXVi2_AW0OQzrBSVwc1ibvUSh-6gYBOpbFo6z7f

Güçdemir, H. (n.d.). Emerald. Retrieved from clustering:

https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/IMDS-01-2015-0027/full/pdf?
casa_token=aEjKGS7RCLQAAAAA:zizXOplGLpgeFBhPEqtuUSQkOj_4JkFZSpynqgAgCbEIGF_7uHEA
tNFxmui_NeJrLouUFSLTSyFqKQd3qDkfmmNAvOiGuQpgjJ5ORnMJ5odG8bWFK_IN

He, W. (2017). Application of social media. Retrieved from

https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/OIR-07-2016-0201/full/pdf?
casa_token=5iX-mTdEdDoAAAAA:bvr1xXa-FuB1wVTMeQq-
Kh_nF0N6lVoyHsDpovCNvbECwCWFF9hMankIQpVMNH4brr9_oMY2p7yuvy6YNfbAUzm55nJvtfL
VE7iZ6DFmK8Qh2pXc1OMG