The life cycle of online smartphone reviews: Investigating dynamic change in customer opinion using sentiment analysis

초록

Sentiment analysis of online customer reviews is gaining increasing interests in the field of product design. This paper raises a concern for a common approach in the field of product design, where all reviews of a product are aggregated and analyzed as a whole. Considering that reviews are generated at different times over a long life cycle, a significant change in the review content is highly likely to exist between earlier and later reviews. To see if and how the review for the same product changes over time, this paper presents an empirical study investigating the life cycle of online smartphone reviews. Taking the Samsung Galaxy S5‘s 10,560 reviews posted in 2014-2018 as the subject, the dynamic change of customers’ opinion was examined using lexicon-based, feature-level sentiment analysis. For three individual features (i.e., battery, display, and camera), the change in the referring rate as well as the percentages of positive and negative reviews are analyzed. The results show that, even if the product is the same, the customer evaluation can vary over time possibly due to product obsolescence over time and differences in the degree of consumers’ innovativeness. © 2020, ICIC International. All rights reserved.

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