Analysis of pet‐food customer postpurchase experience using online customer reviews: Implications for product and marketing strategies

Abstract Pet‐food industry growth and demand for specialized product offerings have generated new opportunities for companies to enhance their competitiveness and profitability through effective product differentiation. Recent rise in e‐commerce and technological advancements for capturing and analyzing online customer review data provide new opportunities for large‐scale assessment of customer perceptions of product attributes. This paper presents an integrated qualitative and quantitative approach for utilizing online customer review data to generate insights for informing pet‐food industry product and marketing decisions. The results from the analysis of 5632 online reviews of two pet‐food products highlight (i) product attributes that effectively differentiate (or put on par) two competing pet‐food products, (ii) identify product attributes that are most important for customer postpurchase experience, and (iii) estimate the effect of specific attributes on customers' positive (or negative) postpurchase experience. Specific pet‐food attributes examined include packaging, health/benefit, ingredient, taste, smell, appearance/form, natural/organic, processing, sourcing, small/large breed, price, and service. The advantages of this approach include its ability to leverage large amounts of easily accessible data and its generalizability to the analysis of other consumer goods that have significant online sales and customer review data [EconLit Citations: Q13, M31].