Does brand type affect what consumers discuss? A comparison of attribute-based reviews of value and premium brands of an innovative product
ISSN: 1066-2243
Article publication date: 21 July 2021
Issue publication date: 15 March 2022
Abstract
Purpose
This research aims to investigate the role of brand types (value brand vs premium brand) in determining review content. Specifically, this research focuses on attribute-based reviews for an innovative product and suggests that consumers of value brands tend to discuss more attributes in their product reviews than those of premium brands. Also, this research suggests that review valence and time have moderating effects on the relationship between brand types and the number of attributes discussed in a review.
Design/methodology/approach
This research employed a data set of online consumer reviews (N = 106,980) for wireless earbuds from Amazon.com. It extracted products' attributes from review text using Bigram analysis and measured the number of attributes discussed in a review. It then analyzed the effect of brand types (value brand vs premium brand) on the number of attributes and the moderating effect of review valence and time.
Findings
The estimation results of Poisson models reveal that reviews for value brands tend to contain more product attributes than reviews for premium brands. Interestingly, the tendency is stronger among positive (vs negative) reviews, and it decreases over time as more reviews are accumulated.
Originality/value
While existing studies focused on the outcomes of the review content, there was not enough investigation into the determinants of the review content. This study focuses on the number of attributes discussed in a review, a key content characteristic, and provides the first empirical evidence that review content differs by brand types of an innovative product.
Keywords
Citation
Yi, J. and Oh, Y.K. (2022), "Does brand type affect what consumers discuss? A comparison of attribute-based reviews of value and premium brands of an innovative product", Internet Research, Vol. 32 No. 2, pp. 606-619. https://doi.org/10.1108/INTR-08-2020-0478
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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