The Effect of Customer"s Visit Frequency on Word-of-mouth Effect : Focusing on the Sentiment Score of the Consumer Review

온라인 소비자리뷰는 리뷰어의 해당 업체 방문 횟수 등 리뷰어의 업체에 대한 정보나 경험에 따라 달라진다. 이러한 정보와 경험의 차이로 인한 리뷰의 차이는 리뷰를 이용하는 다른 소비자의 행동과 리뷰 대상 업체성과에 차별적인 영향을 줄 수 있다. 관련 선행연구에 따르면 소비자 리뷰의 대표적인 특성으로 리뷰의 양과 내용의 극성을 들 수 있고, 이러한 특성에 따라 리뷰의 효과는 달라질 수 있다. 선행 연구에서는 리뷰의 극성을 위해 별점과 같은 지표를 사용했지만, 최근에는 리뷰 텍스트 내의 감정을 직접 분석하여 극성을 판단하는 텍스트 마이닝 방법이 많이 이용되고 있다. 본 연구의 주요 연구질문은 리뷰어의 경험의 양이 그들이 작성하는 리뷰에 미치는 효과를 알아보고, 이러한 차이가 업체의 성과에 미치는 영향을 텍스트 마이닝 방법을 이용하여 실증적으로 분석하고자 하였다. 본 연구 수행을 위해 2019년 12월～2020년 12월의 네이버 스마트플레이스에 등록된 15,569개 업체에 대한 총 1,385,492개의 전체 방문자 리뷰와 평점의 정보를 python의 셀레니움 툴을 이용하여 수집하였다. 리뷰어의 경험은 온라인 리뷰상에 노출된 방문횟수를 통해 기존고객과 신규고객으로 분리하였으며, 이들의 리뷰에서 나타난 감정의 차이를 분석하였다. 연구의 결과에서는 기존고객의 리뷰가 신규고객의 리뷰보다 더 긍정적인 것으로 나타났다. 또한 신규고객과 기존고객의 리뷰 감정은 리뷰 이용자들의 업체페이지 유입에 긍정적인 관계가 있는 것으로 나타났다. 하지만 업체의 성과와 밀접한 관계가 있는 전화걸기, 길찾기, 공유 등과 같은 변수들과의 관계에 있어서는 기존고객의 리뷰에서는 긍정적인 영향이 나타났지만 신규고객의 리뷰에서는 유의미한 영향이 없는 것으로 나타났다. 이러한 결과는 기존고객의 리뷰가 소비자의 구매전환과 업체의 성과 향상에 더 효과적임을 나타내며, 고객관계관리에 있어 중요한 시사점을 제공할 수 있다. Online consumer reviews are online contents created by consumers, who have purchased and used a product or service. The consumer reviews have recently become an essential element of online marketing practice frequently used by both consumers and sellers. Consumers after using a product or service write a review based on their usage experience. Consumers who have not used the product or service may then benefit from the review to learn about the product. In other words, online consumer reviews help sellers by reducing risks associated with purchasing the product. Reviewers have different amounts of past experience, which is known to be an important factor that can change how reviewers perceive their product or service experience, thereby affecting the review contents and quality. For example, an online review written by a consumer who has visited a restaurant once a week for the past month versus a review written by another consumer who visited the same place just once are likely to have significantly different experience, thereby writing consumer reviews that would have different review contents and quality. Furthermore, an impact of such reviews cannot be the same as the first one tends to have stronger impact than the latter. While the past experience is important in determining the quality and contents of consumer reviews, previous studies have not yet examined how reviewer’s past experience would affect their review contents and the impact of such reviews on stores. Therefore, this paper investigates how the difference in reviewer’s past experience would affect the contents and quality of their reviews, and then how these reviews affect the marketing performance of the sellers by affecting other consumers who would read consumer reviews about the sellers. The main research questions of this paper are as follows. First, this paper attempts to find out the effects of reviewer’s past experience on the review contents they currently write. To this end, we divide reviewers into two groups based on their experience levels, new customers, who visited a particular restaurant for the first time, and existing customers, who have visited the same restaurant multiple times. Second, this paper examines the effect of reviews written by new and existing customers on marketing performance of stores. Specifically, we empirically analyze whether the reviews of existing customers who would have more experience have stronger impact than those written by new customers. To answer above research questions, we use data, which consist of 1,385,492 consumer reviews and their star ratings for 15,569 restaurants and beauty shops from December 2019 to December 2020. Our data come from two sources. First, we collect customer review texts, star ratings and other store related information using Python"s Selenium tool. After dividing our data into two groups, new and existing customers based on the number visits a reviewer has made for the same restaurant, we analyze the difference in sentiments in their reviews. Second, we map the first dataset on customer reviews and store information to customer click data on the stores’ homepages to understand the impact of customer sentiment differences in customer reviews on stores’ marketing performance. Our empirical analysis provides following results. First, reviews written by existing customers are usually more positive than those written by new customers. This implies that existing customers are more satisfied than new customers, or they repeat visit the stores due to their higher satisfaction from previous visits. Second, our results show that reviews written by both new and existing customers have positive impacts on the number of page views by customers, who click and visit stores’ homepages to obtain more information about the stores. Third, reviews written by existing customers have positive impacts on stores’ marketing performance. On the other hand, reviews written by new customer reviews do not have significant effect on the marketing performance. Overall, our results suggest that reviews written by existing customers, who have visited store multiple times and have more experience, are more beneficial to stores than those written by new customers, since the review sentiments from existing customers’ reviews tend to be more positive and they are more likely to increase customers’ interests on the stores.