Exploration of Spa Leisure Consumption Sentiment towards Different Holidays and Different Cities through Online Reviews: Implications for Customer Segmentation

Abstract

With the improvements in per capita disposable income, and an increase in work-related pressure, demand for leisure consumption such as foot bath spas is constantly increasing. Analysis of leisure consumption sentiment is of great importance for the leisure service industry—to meet customer needs, improve service quality and improve customer relationship management. However, traditional sentiment analysis approaches only aimed to ascertain the overall sentiment of the customer, which is less effective for analyzing customer satisfaction on account of customer size, different customer locations, and different leisure holidays. Sentiment analysis via online reviews can assist different businesses, including foot bath spa services, to better inform the development of customer segmentation strategies and ensure optimal customer relationship management. Hence, the objective of this paper is to explore foot bath spa leisure consumption sentiment towards different holidays and different cities by applying data mining via online reviews, so as to help optimize customer segmentation. A novel general framework and related sentiment analysis methods were proposed and then conducted through a collection of datasets from customers’ textual reviews of foot bath spa merchants in three cities in China on the Meituan social media platform. Findings confirm that the proposed general framework and methods can be used to gain insights into the swing characteristics of sentiment towards different holidays and different cities, to better develop customer segmentation according to the city-holiday emoticon face patterns obtained through sentiment tendency analysis from online social media review data. The study results can help to develop better customer and marketing strategies, thereby creating sustainable competitive advantages, and can be extended to other fields to support sustainable development.