What attracts vehicle consumers’ buying: A Saaty scale-based VIKOR (SSC-VIKOR) approach from after-sales textual perspective?
Industrial Management & Data Systems
ISSN: 0263-5577
Article publication date: 2 December 2019
Issue publication date: 10 January 2020
Abstract
Purpose
The increasingly booming e-commerce development has stimulated vehicle consumers to express individual reviews through online forum. The purpose of this paper is to probe into the vehicle consumer consumption behavior and make recommendations for potential consumers from textual comments viewpoint.
Design/methodology/approach
A big data analytic-based approach is designed to discover vehicle consumer consumption behavior from online perspective. To reduce subjectivity of expert-based approaches, a parallel Naïve Bayes approach is designed to analyze the sentiment analysis, and the Saaty scale-based (SSC) scoring rule is employed to obtain specific sentimental value of attribute class, contributing to the multi-grade sentiment classification. To achieve the intelligent recommendation for potential vehicle customers, a novel SSC-VIKOR approach is developed to prioritize vehicle brand candidates from a big data analytical viewpoint.
Findings
The big data analytics argue that “cost-effectiveness” characteristic is the most important factor that vehicle consumers care, and the data mining results enable automakers to better understand consumer consumption behavior.
Research limitations/implications
The case study illustrates the effectiveness of the integrated method, contributing to much more precise operations management on marketing strategy, quality improvement and intelligent recommendation.
Originality/value
Researches of consumer consumption behavior are usually based on survey-based methods, and mostly previous studies about comments analysis focus on binary analysis. The hybrid SSC-VIKOR approach is developed to fill the gap from the big data perspective.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank anonymous referees for the remarkable comments and enormous endeavor on the paper improvement. This study is financially supported by following programs: the Soft Science Research Project in Henan Province from Henan Science and Technology Department (Grant No. 192400410016); and the Scientific Research Starting Fund for Doctors from Zhengzhou University of Light Industry (Grant No. 0140/13501050042).
Citation
Zhou, F., Lim, M.K., He, Y. and Pratap, S. (2020), "What attracts vehicle consumers’ buying: A Saaty scale-based VIKOR (SSC-VIKOR) approach from after-sales textual perspective?", Industrial Management & Data Systems, Vol. 120 No. 1, pp. 57-78. https://doi.org/10.1108/IMDS-01-2019-0034
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2019, Emerald Publishing Limited