A unique method of constructing brand perceptual maps by the text mining of multimedia consumer reviews

Brand perceptual mapping is a visual technique, it displays how a brand is positioned in the mind of customers, as well as in relation to the competitors. With the rapid growth of e-commerce and the abundance of online consumer-generated content, there is no need for marketers to go through market research in order to understand consumers' opinions. Therefore, in this study, the authors propose a unique method which allows the building of a perceptual map automatically by mining consumer opinions from in particular online product reviews. The authors employ opinion mining techniques to extract and rank the product aspects that are important to customers, during purchasing digital tablets. Subsequently, they generate a score for each brand in these aspects and build the perceptual map using clustering of the brands by these scores. This proposed method is applied to the online customer reviews for digital tablets obtained from Amazon.com. The experimental results highlight the proposed technique is effective and able to correctly depict the position of a brand in its particular competitive environment.