Supplementing consumer insights at Electrolux by mining social media: An exploratory case study

Abstract: Purpose – The aim of this thesis is to explore the possibility of text mining social media, for consumer insights from an organizational perspective. Design/methodology/approach – An exploratory, single case embedded case study with inductive approach and partially mixed, concurrent, dominant status mixed method research design. The case study contains three different studies to try to triangulate the research findings and support research objective of using social media for consumer insights for new products, new ideas and helping research and development process of any organization. Findings – Text mining is a useful, novel, flexible and an unobtrusive method to harness the hidden information in social media. By text-mining social media, an organization can find consumer insights from a large data set and this initiative requires an understanding of social media and its building blocks. In addition, a consumer focused product development approach not only drives social media mining but also enriched by using consumer insights from social media. Research limitations/implications – Text mining is a relatively new subject and focus on developing better analytical tool kits would promote the use of this novel method. The researchers in the field of consumer driven new product development can use social media as additional evidence in their research. Practical implications – The consumer insights gained from the text mining of social media within a workable ethical policy are positive implications for any organization. Unlike conventional marketing research methods text mining is social media is cost and time effective. Originality/value –This thesis attempts to use innovatively text-mining tools, which appear, in the field of computer sciences to mine social media for gaining better understanding of consumers thereby enriching the field of marketing research, a cross-industry effort. The ability of consumers to spread the electronic word of mouth (eWOM) using social media is no secret and organizations should now consider social media as a source to supplement if not replace the insights captured using conventional marketing research methods. Keywords – Social media, Web 2.0, Consumer generated content, Text mining, Mixed methods design, Consumer insights, Marketing research, Case study, Analytic coding, Hermeneutics, Asynchronous, Emergent strategy Paper type Master Thesis