Storying Marketing Research: The Twisted Tale of a Consumer Profiled
By opening with a story, this article mildly subverts the typical conventions adopted by journal article writers. It is a direct response to calls from within management and marketing studies to embrace alternative modes of expression. Blurring fact (distilled from the findings of in-depth qualitative research) and fiction (distilled from our fevered imaginations), our case study-based story presents the twisted tale of a consumer profiled. By connecting dimensions of marketing, consumption, research, and practice, we seek to question whether digitally-equipped marketers can ever understand the true nature of today's inscrutable consumer.
We examine the antecedents of customer satisfaction in the restaurant sector, paying particular attention to perceived value and price level. Using Latent Dirichlet Allocation, we extract latent topics from the text of Yelp! reviews, then analyze the relationship between these topics and satisfaction, measured as the difference between review rating and user average review rating.