The Impact of COVID-19 on Consumers’ Psychological Behavior Based on Data Mining for Online User Comments in the Catering Industry in China

Abstract

The outbreak of COVID-19 in late 2019 has had a huge impact on people’s daily life. Many restaurant businesses have been greatly affected by it. Consumers’ preferences for catering industry in China have changed, such as environmental hygiene, variety of dishes, and service methods. Therefore, the analysis of consumer preference differences and changes before and after the epidemic can not only provide emergency strategies for the catering industry but further improve the catering industry’s ability to deal with public health emergencies. This paper takes five cities in China as representatives to explore the impact of COVID-19 on China’s catering industry. Based on catering review data from August 2019 to April 2020, this paper first carries out Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic analysis and SNOWNLP (A Python library for processing Chinese text) sentiment analysis. Then this paper compares the results of topic classification and sentiment analysis before and after the epidemic. Furthermore, differences and changes of consumer preferences are obtained and preferences of consumers under COVID-19 are analyzed and forecasted. The results of LDA thematic analysis before the outbreak of COVID-19 show that consumers tend to punch in cyber celebrity restaurants and pay more attention to the taste of dishes, whereas after it consumers pay more attention to the changes of dishes, dining environment as well as epidemic prevention. The number of packages and takeout was also increasing. However, the waiting time is constantly considered by consumers before and after COVID-19. Firstly, to our surprise, final outcome of emotional analysis showed that consumers’ emotional state was more positive after the epidemic than before. COVID-19 has changed the lifestyle of consumers, consumption concepts, and consumption habits. Therefore, businesses also need to take positive and flexible measures to actively get feedback from consumers to adjust dishes and business methods. Secondly, the psychological attitude of catering consumers is relatively positive during the epidemic period, which indicates that consumers have great confidence in the recovery and development of the catering industry. Businesses can comply with consumers’ psychology and combine consumption vouchers with restaurant discounts to promote consumers’ consumption. Finally, the environment and service play more and more important effect on consumers’ emotional scores at present, which indicates that dining state and comfortable mealtime environment are becoming increasingly valuable. Therefore, businesses need to improve service standards.