Corporate reputation is an intangible resource that is closely tied to an organization’s success but measuring it and to derive actions that can improve the reputations can be a long and expensive journey for an organization. In the available literature, corporate reputation is primarily measured through surveys, which can be time and cost intensive. This paper uses online reviews on the web as the source for a machine-learning driven aspect-based sentiment analysis that can enable organizations to evaluate their corporate reputation on a fine-grained level. The analysis is done unsupervised without organizations needing to manually label datasets. Using the insights generated through the analysis, on one hand, organizations can save costs and time to measure corporate reputation, and, on the other hand, it provides an in-depth analysis that splits the overall reputation into multiple aspects, with which organizations can identify weaknesses and in turn improve their corporate reputa tion. Therefore, this research is relevant for organizations aiming to understand and improve their corporate reputation to achieve success, for example, in form of financial performance, or for organizations that help and consult other organizations on their journeys to increased success. Our approach is validated, evaluated and illustrated with Trustpilot review data.
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This research demonstrates the power and robustness of the vocabulary method by Hernández-Rubio et al. (2019) for aspect extraction from online review data. We showcase that this algorithm not only works on the English language based on the CoreNLP toolkit, but also extend it on the Dutch language, specifically with aid of the Frog toolkit. Results on sampled datasets for three different retailers show that it can be used to extract fine-grained aspects that are relevant to acquire corporate reputation insights.
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Retail industry consists of the establishment of selling consumer goods (i.e. technology, pharmaceuticals, food and beverages, apparels and accessories, home improvement etc.) and services (i.e. specialty and movies) to customers through multiple channels of distribution including both the traditional brickand-mortar and online retailing. Managing corporate reputation of retail companies is crucial as it has many advantages, for instance, it has been proven to impact generated revenues (Wang et al., 2016). But, in order to be able to manage corporate reputation, one has to be able to measure it, or, nowadays even better, listen to relevant social signals that are out there on the public web. One of the most extensive and widely used frameworks for measuring corporate reputation is through conducting elaborated surveys with respective stakeholders (Fombrun et al., 2015). This approach is valuable but deemed to be laborious and resource-heavy and will not allow to generate automatic alerts and quick and live insights that are extremely needed in this era of internet. For these purposes a social listening approach is needed that can be tailored to online data such as consumer reviews as the main data source. Online review datasets are a form of electronic Word-of-Mouth (WOM) that, when a data source is picked that is relevant to retail, commonly contain relevant information about customers’ perceptions regarding products (Pookulangara, 2011) and that are massively available. The algorithm that we have built in our application provides retailers with reputation scores for all variables that are deemed to be relevant to retail in the model of Fombrun et al. (2015). Examples of such variables for products and services are high quality, good value, stands behind, and meets customer needs. We propose a new set of subvariables with which these variables can be operationalized for retail in particular. Scores are being calculated using proportions of positive opinion pairs such as <fast, delivery> or <rude, staff> that have been designed per variable. With these important insights extracted, companies can act accordingly and proceed to improve their corporate reputation. It is important to emphasize that, once the design is complete and implemented, all processing can be performed completely automatic and unsupervised. The application makes use of a state of the art aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) framework because of ABSA’s ability to generate sentiment scores for all relevant variables and aspects. Since most online data is in open form and we deliberately want to avoid labelling any data by human experts, the unsupervised aspectator algorithm has been picked. It employs a lexicon to calculate sentiment scores and uses syntactic dependency paths to discover candidate aspects (Bancken et al., 2014). We have applied our approach to a large number of online review datasets that we sampled from a list of 50 top global retailers according to National Retail Federation (2020), including both offline and online operation, and that we scraped from trustpilot, a public website that is well-known to retailers. The algorithm has carefully been evaluated by manually annotating a randomly sampled subset of the datasets for validation purposes by two independent annotators. The Kappa’s score on this subset was 80%.
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The overarching aim of this paper is to define, develop and present a processing pipeline that has practical application for companies, meaning, being extendable, representative from marketing perspective, and reusable with high reliability for any new, unseen data that generates insights for evaluation of the reputation construct based on collected reviews for any (e.g. retail) organisation that is willing to analyse or improve its performance. First, determinant attributes have to be defined in order to generate insights for evaluation with respect to corporate reputation. Second, in order to generate insights data has to be collected and therefore a method has to be developed in order to extract online stakeholder data from reviews. Furthermore, a suitable algorithm has to be created to assess the extracted information based on the determinant attributes in order to analyse the data. Preliminary results indicate that application of our processing pipeline to online employee review data that are publicly available on the web is valid.
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