Harnessing social media platforms to measure customer-based hotel brand equity

Abstract

In recent years, there has been an exponential increase in the volume of user-generated content being made available in social media platforms of the Web 2.0 genre. Among the most valuable from a marketing perspective is the prevalence of online reviews of products and services which can serve as vast, up-to-the-minute sources of data for research and marketing management. In this paper, we describe our work on the analysis of the different components of brand equity and their relations in hotels, using data extracted from social media platforms. By using online sources of reviews, we can achieve a greater degree of confidence in our findings as we have access to a far greater quantity of reviews spanning any given timeframe. Additionally we can have greater confidence in the information contained therein, as the reviews reflect the opinions of the customers considered at leisure, usually after their return from the hotel, rather than a hastily completed survey as the customer leaves the hotel.