The impact of text product reviews on sales

Purpose – The aim of this research is to theorize and demonstrate that analyzing consumers’ text product reviews using text mining can enhance the explanatory power of a product sales model, particularly for hedonic products, which tend to generate emotional and subjective product evaluations. Previous research in this area has been more focused on utilitarian products. Design/methodology/approach – Our text clustering-based procedure segments text reviews into multiple clusters in association with consumers’ numeric ratings to address consumer heterogeneity in taste preferences and quality valuations and the J-distribution of numeric product ratings. This approach is novel in terms of combining text clustering with numeric product ratings to address consumers’ subjective product evaluations. Findings – Using the movie industry as our empirical application, we find that our approach of making use of product text reviews can improve the explanatory power and predictive validity of the box-office sales mode...