Identifying product features that delight customers : are online reviews and surveys comparable?

Abstract

Online reviews have proliferated in recent years. They are an important source of information for both consumers and companies. From a company perspective, they support the marketing controlling process. We focus on the company perspective and, in particular, on two research questions: How can companies identify product features that delight consumers based on online reviews? How do results from online reviews compare to results from surveys? We use smartphones as an example and show that the overall rating is comparable between online reviews (N=3,897) and a representative survey (N=401)