Review of Professional Management- A Journal of New Delhi Institute of Management

R. Venkatesakumar ¹, G. Vidyashankar ², Sathish A. S. ³, B. Rajeswari ⁴, S. Madhavan ⁵

Affiliations
1 Professor in the Department of Management Studies, Pondicherry University, IN
2 Chief Executive Officer, Only Success Leadership Academy Private Limited, Ashok Nagar, Chennai, IN
3 Associate Professor, VIT Business School, Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore, IN
4 Assistant Professor, Department of Management Studies, Pondicherry University, IN
5 Professor, Department of Management Studies, Manonmaniam Sundaranar University, Tirunelveli, IN

Abstract

Researchers and marketers investigate the consumer review data available from social media, blogs and product websites. The research is helpful to identify the market segments and add insights on online consumer behavioural characteristics. In this research, we compare consumer sentiments across the private label, national and MNC brands. To compute the level of consumer sentiment, we collect online consumer reviews from a product review website using text mining and assign a sentiment score for each review. The scores are compared for the private label brands (PLBs) vis-à-vis national and MNC brands. In addition, to broaden the understanding of PLBs, we compare online consumer reviews for regular as well as organic brands. The results show that PLBs have higher sentiment scores than national and MNC brands. In the comparison of regular and organic products, the sentiment scores are significantly higher for PLBs than national and MNC brands. Except for the organic beverages, the sentiment scores are better for the PLBs. The findings establish that PLBs' performance is better in the product categories studied. The results suggest that PLBs can be considered as a position defence strategy for retail chains and super/hypermarkets to tackle competition.

Keywords

Sentiment Analysis, Organic Products, Private Label Brands, eWOM, Text Analytics.

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