An application of text mining to capture and analyze eWOM: A pilot study on tourism sector

Marketing concept has progressed through different phases of evolution in the past. At the moment, customer relationship management is considered as the last era of marketing development. The main purpose of this approach is to build long-term oriented profitable relationships with customers. So, companies should know better their customers. This knowledge can be created through a deeper analysis of companies' data with data mining tools. Companies which are able to use data mining tools will gain strong competitive advantages for their strategic decisions. Hotel industry is selected in this study, since it provides a warehouse of customer comments from which precious knowledge can be obtained if text mining as a data mining tool is used appropriately. Thus, this study attempts to explain the stages of text mining with the use of Rapidminer. As a result, different approaches according to the customer satisfaction/dissatisfaction are discussed to build competitive advantages. © 2015, IGI Global. All rights reserved