Abstract
Because of the rapid development of communication and service in Taiwan, competition among telecommunication companies has become ever fiercer. Differences in marketing strategy usually become the key factor in keeping existing customers while attracting new ones. Although electronic word-of-mouth (e-WOM) is one of the most important pieces of information to a consumer making a purchase decision, very few articles on opinion mining have discussed and compared the relationship between multifaceted word-of-mouth (WOM) and marketing strategy. In this paper, we use our Chinese opinion-mining system (Wu et al. in J Supercomput 73:2987–3001, 2017) not only to retrieve articles related to 4G and conduct reputation analysis but also to discuss the relation between WOM and marketing strategy. The results show that (1) e-WOM can immediately and directly reflect the results of marketing strategy, and (2) although users are primarily concerned with aspects of price, online speed, and signal quality, for most Taiwanese customers, price is the key in choosing a telecommunication company. Moreover, although this paper used 4G-related articles from June 2014 to June 2015 for analysis, the results are consistent with the Taiwanese telecommunication companies’ current marketing strategy of attracting customers through low pricing.
1 Introduction
Mobile communication in Taiwan has formally advanced into the 4G era. Currently, Taiwanese 4G users comprise 20% of the country’s 24.63 million mobile users, and the number of telecommunication companies has increased from four to five. As 4G becomes more popular, increasing numbers of Taiwanese use handheld smart devices for a wide range of diversified services through mobile communication networks. It is foreseeable that competition among telecommunication companies will become fierce. Thus, each major telecommunication company will plan different marketing strategies to retain customers and even attempt to win other companies’ customers.
5 Conclusion and discussion
We have performed analysis on e-WOM for service products in 4G markets. The results indicated that price can indeed attract consumers’ attention. In December 2016, Company C, Company D, and Company E are still practising the marketing strategy of attracting customers with low prices; the results also showed that the effects of marketing strategy will immediately be reflected in e-WOM performance. Because a user’s online opinions (WOM) about a company’s product or service reflect his or her true feelings, companies can use e-WOM to examine the effectiveness of their marketing strategy and make corresponding adjustments. Moreover, they can also identify deficiencies of their own products and services and make improvements.
