IDEI Distinguished Research Seminar Series

The advancement of IT has made it possible to understand customer requirements through publicly available information, such as online word-of-mouth. We extend previous literature that studies customer requirements through a single information source of online review, by proposing a framework of incorporating one additional information source, that is, consumers’ purchase records. This enables us to examine the relationship between customers’ expressed satisfaction (words) and their actual purchase (deeds). Utilizing unique data sets about the actual sales records as well as online review information in a cell phone market, we mine and characterize each product feature in a two-dimensional model, based on how important they are to customers’ expressed satisfaction as well as actual purchase. We find that, surprisingly, consumers’ words and deeds are not always consistent: while some requirements are expressed as important features  in determining customer satisfaction in ‘words’, they do not stand out in factors that influence consumers’ purchase; there are also requirements that are ‘silent’ in satisfaction, while customers value them when making purchase. This implies the importance of incorporating the “deed” dimension into the understanding of customer requirements. Understanding the differences in product requirements reflected from these two dimensions offers guidelines for better product design, such as which features to improve/innovate, and which features to differentiate from the competitors.